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I wonder sometimes what might have happened if I'd moved out of the house when I started college. While many of my friends from high school were reveling in their new apartments and new freedoms, I was returning home every day to my familiar bedroom, eating dinner with the family, and asking if I could take the station wagon out for a group date when my homework was finished. By day I was confronting some rather strange and unsettling philosophies in my classes (the University of Utah being a notoriously liberal institution, at least when compared to the rest of the state), but at night my life differed very little from when I still went to high school.

Oh, I had my small adventures along the fringes of counterculture. I went to jazz concerts. I attended art films at a vaguely seedy theater in downtown Salt Lake called the Blue Mouse. I bought and sold books and records at a sprawling, brick-walled store called Cosmic Aeroplane, where incense scented the air and most of the magazines in stock were printed on grainy gray paper. Cosmic Aeroplane had two separate basements. Stacks and stacks of old used books filled the first basement, and I could spend hours exploring that fusty maze of words and ideas. I only ventured into the second basement once, in the company of several of my high school friends.

I had always sensed something a little disquieting about Cosmic Aeroplane, though I couldn't put my finger on it. I had the feeling that something unspeakable was happening just out of view, behind the scenes, something so vile and occult that I was placing my soul in peril just innocently shopping there for books. When my friends and I ventured into the second basement, I got an eyeful of what was bothering me, although I didn't really understand what I was seeing. This is because I had no familiarity with the term "head shop." We stood boggle-eyed a few moments amidst the incense smoke, black-light posters, and shelves and glass counters overflowing with drug paraphernalia, then beat a hasty retreat.

"That was really creepy," said Luke Thomas on the sidewalk outside, breath steaming in the cold night air.

"No doubt," said Kenny Arlington. "You could feel it all around you. That place was just full of evil spirits."

The three of us shuddered collectively. It was a few months before I dared to enter Cosmic Aeroplane again, even for something as innocuous as buying science fiction novels.

#

This was me, circa 1985: always ready to believe that everyone around me was far more in tune with spiritual matters than I.

I knew perfectly well how to think for myself. I did it all the time. It's just that, when I reached a conclusion that clashed with canonical Mormon doctrine, I would assume that the error was mine, and I would berate myself for having let my limited mortal reasoning lead me astray.

"O that cunning plan of the evil one!" exclaims the Book of Mormon. "O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish."

I didn't want to perish. So when I couldn't make my beliefs make sense, I would defer to the ones who seemed to have a better handle on things. And in my circle of acquaintances, that seemed to be almost everybody.

#

For that reason, I doubt my college experience would have turned out much differently if I had lived away from home. I was far too timid to do anything very outwardly wrong, and as long as there were other good Mormons around—and liberal school or no, half the students at the U were still Mormon—I would probably never outgrow that tendency.

Which is why the six weeks I spent at Michigan State University during the summer of 1985 were so significant.

That and the small role it played in sending me to jail a year and a half later.

#

Just as I was graduating from high school in 1984, I read a remarkable article in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Its author was the writer, editor and critic Algis Budrys, a lion on the science fiction scene of the fifties and sixties. He described a writing workshop called Clarion, which took place every summer at Michigan State University, and related his experiences as a teacher there. Early in 1985, a second article appeared in Asimov's. The author of this one was Lucius Shepard, one of the premier young writers in the genre, whose name was routinely mentioned in the same breath with William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson. Shepard's article described his experiences as a student at Clarion.

The thrust of both articles seemed to be that, while a talent for writing could not be instilled where none existed, a young writer with talent could progress far more rapidly in an intensive program taught by professional authors than he or she could working alone with only form rejection letters from far-off editors for feedback.

For some time, I had been seeing a peculiar phrase in the bios of many of the authors whose stories appeared in Asimov's: "graduate of the Clarion workshop." I had finally discovered what that mysterious phrase meant, and the profusion of these writers seemed to indicate that Budrys and Shepard weren't just blowing smoke. Clarion worked.

And if it worked that well, then I had to go.

#

I figured that the summer of '85 was going to be my best and only shot at attending Clarion. I would be getting ready to leave on a mission during the summer of '86, and I wouldn't get back for another two years, so if I missed '85, then my next opportunity wouldn't come until the summer of '89, and that was just too long for me to wait. Besides, I might not have the time or money to spare by then. So it had to be '85.

I sent off for an application right away, but I knew, even if I was accepted for the program, I could never attend unless I somehow wormed permission out of my father.

The straightforward approach seemed best.

I placed the two issues of Asimov's, with the Clarion articles clearly bookmarked, in my father's briefcase one morning before work.

#

A few days later, I accosted my father in the kitchen before breakfast. He was always the first one up, and he would put a huge pot of oatmeal on the stove to boil. The object among the rest of us, my mother included, was to get up late enough that the oatmeal would be gone and you could eat cold cereal by default and still get out of the house on time.

I rarely won in these reverse breakfast sweepstakes, especially during that first year of college when I had to car-pool with my father. But on that fateful morning, I didn't try to compete. With false cheer, I bounced upstairs from my room in the basement, scooped up a bowl of hot oatmeal, and joined my father at the kitchen table. He was, as usual, watching the morning devotional on KBYU, Brigham Young University's public television station. At the end of the prerecorded sermon, delivered with lethal monotony by one of the blander church leaders, I made my move.

"So," I said, with nowhere near the nonchalance I'd hoped to achieve. I was nearly frazzled with nerves. I hated asking my father for anything. "Did you happen to read either of those articles about the Clarion workshop?"

"I read them," said my father. "I presume you didn't plant them in my briefcase just for my entertainment."

"No."

"Let's leave off the discussion of whether or not you can go for now. How would you propose to pay for this thing? It says it costs two thousand dollars to attend."

"That's just an estimate, including travel," I said. "The tuition's only a thousand."

My father waited with raised eyebrows for me to continue.

"I thought I could use some of what I've saved up."

"Your cabinet-making money?"

I nodded.

"That's for your mission," he said. "Those are consecrated funds."

I cringed inside. When Mormons consecrate olive oil for use in anointing and blessing the sick, they recite a special prayer over it. My father had not actually prayed over my paychecks before depositing them in an account I had no access to, but in his mind that money was just as sacred as the consecrated oil at the back of the kitchen cabinet. It was my mission fund. That money was bottled up, labeled, and set aside expressly for the purpose of paying my way through two years in the service of the Lord, and any other use of it was unthinkable.

This was going to be every bit as difficult as I had feared.

#

Despite its billions of dollars in assets, the Mormon church does not pay its missionaries. Service is strictly on a volunteer basis, with the expense borne by the missionary or his family. You don't even get an honorarium at the end of your service, like you would in the Peace Corps. The object is to induce the greatest sacrifice possible and thus to bind the missionary to the church for life. The more you've given up in service to an institution, the harder it is to break away from it. You hate to face the possibility that all that time and effort went for nothing.

Obviously some parts of the world are more expensive to live in than others. Thus, it used to be that applying for a mission was a lottery in more ways than one. If the Lord called you to Guadalajara for your mission, you might be able to get by on seventy dollars a month, at least back in the mid-eighties. If He called you to Tokyo, it might be more like seven hundred. Either way, you were well-advised to have plenty of cash on hand before applying. If you couldn't afford to pay your own way, you could be supported by the general church mission fund, which consists of donations from members earmarked specifically for that purpose. But the church itself won't help you.

The situation is more equitable today. Each missionary who can, contributes an equal amount to the general mission fund every month. This money is then distributed to missions around the world as needed, with those in less expensive countries subsidizing the ones suffering from higher costs of living. Thus my brother Tim, who went on a mission to Florida in 1994, and my brother Lee, who went on a mission to Japan in 1996, both paid roughly the same amount of money for the privilege.

It's progress of a sort, I suppose.

#

My oatmeal steamed in the dim light of the kitchen, bleeding away its heat.

"It's only a thousand dollars," I said, aware that this tenacity might cost me far more than that in the long run. "Plus air travel and food. I'll earn that back and more next year."

"It's not right," said my father.

I played my trump card, which seemed less an ace and more a deuce under my father's stare: "It's my money."

As I recall, I had seven or eight thousand dollars in my mission fund. I seriously doubt whether my father had ever stopped to consider the fact that I had earned that money myself, and that morally it was mine to do with as I pleased. Or possibly it had occurred to him, which was why he took charge of every paycheck I brought home.

"Son, that money has been set aside for a sacred purpose. We've been contributing to that account since you were a baby."

"Well, I earned most of it. And I'm not asking for it all—just a little, and I'll earn that back next year."

My father frowned. "Son, why can't you go to this Clarion after your mission? There'll be plenty of time for that later."

The intensity of my need choked my lungs like bronchitis. "I'll probably never be able to take six weeks off during the summer again. At least, not until I'm already a professional writer, and who knows how many years that'll take otherwise."

The frown deepened, as did the crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes.

"And look at it this way," I said. "It'll be the first time I've lived away from home for any length of time. It'll be good preparation for my mission."

He puffed out a short sigh. "This goes against every instinct I have."

"This is what I want to do." I said it with infinitely more conviction than the time I told him yes, I wanted to go on a mission, back on our L.A. road trip.

He seemed to sag, as if the breath had leaked out of him. "Then you can apply."

"Thank you," I said. I tried not to look too triumphant. I wasn't even unhappy to finish my lukewarm bowl of oatmeal.

#

My father was hedging, as I later discovered. He didn't think I'd be accepted to the program. In fact, he was betting two thousand consecrated dollars against it.

#

I sent back my application within the week. There wasn't much to it—just a little bit of information and a short story. Applications were judged on merit. If you submitted a good enough short story, you got in.

I spent the better part of that week trying to decide which of my stories to send. At last I settled on one called "Deus ex Machina," about a sentient computer named ARTHUR ("Artificial Thought with Unlimited Resources") who seeks out and kills God, then takes His place as the arbiter of reality. A band of daring scientists, including ARTHUR's creator, must confront the rogue computer in his lair and attempt to topple him from the Divine Throne. It turns out that God isn't really dead, but only wounded—which makes it a somewhat less daring story than it might have been, at least for a good young Mormon boy, but that was about as far as I dared push my theological speculations at the time.

The story was packed with everything I admired about my favorite science fiction—rigorous logic, bold problem solving, daring geek heroes, fanciful invention, and cosmic scope. It was also fairly short on such commodities as rhythm, pacing, character development, and plausible scientific extrapolation, and dosed with a healthy naïveté on the subject of human relationships.

But whatever. Despite its flaws, it was still the truest arrow in my quiver. I wasn't going to turn into Shakespeare, or even Isaac Asimov, overnight. I had to go with it.

The only problem was, the application specified a story of twenty-five pages or less. Mine was more like seventy-five—a novella, not a short story by any stretch.

But it was also double-spaced. I took a deep breath, retyped the whole thing single-spaced, and got it down to thirty-seven pages.

Not ideal, but it was going to have to do. Praying that the judges would let me get away with such egregious fudging, I sealed the story up along with my application, and sent them both winging on their way to East Lansing, Michigan.

#

One Saturday afternoon in April, the telephone rang. I answered.

A resonant voice at the far end of a long-distance line introduced itself as Professor Landrum from Michigan State University. "Mr. Shunn," he said, "I just wanted to tell you that your application for the Clarion workshop here this summer has been approved."

"That's fantastic!" I said. "Thank you!"

"I just want to confirm with you that you will actually be attending."

I didn't hesitate. "Absolutely."

He went on to discuss tuition and payment dates and residency plans, but I didn't hear much of what he said. None of it mattered. I was going to Clarion! All else was trivial detail.

When I got off the phone I went looking for my father, to break the good news.

#

This is Michigan State University in the summer: green, green, everywhere riotous green. No place in Utah was so green as this—vast swards of grassy green, mounded citadels of rolling green, crumpled hectares of leafy green packed around the branches of monstrous, bursting trees. Stolid brick buildings shrouded in emerald ivy leaves stand like isolated and mysterious jungle islands in that wide ocean of green; travelers ply the lanes from one structure to the next through the humid green air like early adventurers daring the deep just to see what lies on the other side.

My taxi, having navigated this torpid marvel of green, deposited me in front of Phillips Residence Hall, a monumental edifice near the edge of campus, crowded with a century's worth of the ghosts of joyless study. In the coming weeks, the presence here of my fellow Clarionites and me seemed almost an affront to the dignity of academia, and our mounting hilarity a desperate attempt to crack the impenetrable carapace of soberness and propriety which had accreted around the place. Inhabiting only two corridors on the ground floor of that massive dormitory, we could have been parasites in the bowels of a sleeping giant. Our unruliness was the only sign of life for miles about, or so it seemed, though an entire world buzzed with commerce somewhere just beyond sight of our remote fastness.

But those are thoughts that formed over the course of the summer. When first I stood in front of my new home in the sodden air of a Michigan afternoon—June 23, 1985, a Sunday—I was thinking how majestic this all was, and how much greater a thrill it was to be here than in church.

This was going to be one fabulous summer.

#

Professor Landrum, a self-effacing fellow with curly salt-and-pepper hair and a bushy mustache, greeted me inside and helped me carry my suitcase and duffel to my room. Together with my briefcase, these items had caused me no end of trouble when I changed planes in Detroit. Having never flown alone before, I had failed to check my bags all the way through to Lansing from Salt Lake City. I retrieved my bags in Detroit, but they were far too heavy for me to carry all at once. Not knowing what other options were open to me, I leapfrogged all the way to my connecting terminal, across the entire breadth of the airport, dropping my briefcase and duffel to the sidewalk, backtracking to recover my suitcase where I had left it, ferrying that as far again ahead of my other bags, dropping it, going back for the rest, and so on. With three hours between flights, I still made my plane to Lansing with only minutes to spare.

Alone in my room, I both marveled at and shrank from its unexpected luxuries: a ten-foot ceiling, a small refrigerator, a comfortable oversized chair, a desk the size of a pool table, a closet suitable for hosting parties, a bunk bed from which I could choose either berth, a PCjr computer from IBM, and a sheaf of orientation materials to sift through. It was a room for two students to share and bump elbows in over the regular academic year. In the summer abandonment, though, it took on the dimensions of a temple, or a tomb.

I unpacked, and as I did my earlier sense of sangfroid began to dissipate. I had managed to avoid the other arriving students on the way in. Now, while they were out roaming the halls, striking up new acquaintances and taking one another's measure, I battened down in my room like a rabbit, decorating my walls with rock posters, and wondering what the hell I was doing there. I wasn't good enough for this. I wasn't smart enough, or brave enough. Around strangers, I consistently lost my voice; I could barely make myself speak out in class back home. No one here would ever take note of me or acknowledge my talent in any way, because I was incapable of giving them the opportunity. Why had I signed up for this?

Late in the afternoon, a leather-clad bear of man with a walrus mustache and a long ponytail interrupted my neurosis by knocking on the door. He introduced himself as Bryan and invited himself in to chat for a while. He was from the fabulous alien land of Baltimore; I confessed that, until this trip, I had never traveled farther east than Denver. He was over thirty, and we had absolutely nothing in common besides our love of science fiction, but he turned out to be much nicer than I ever expected any long-haired biker type could be.

When he left, I felt much better than I had before. The friend tally was up by one, and it seemed possible that it might keep climbing.

#

That evening we convened for our first workshop session—twenty people crushed into a basement room with flourescent lights overhead and walls painted a greasy yellow. As I surveyed the circle of unfamiliar and threatening faces, I became convinced that my optimistic projection of the night before would prove a complete pipedream. My clenched stomach told me that these people would remain utter strangers to me. At least there was Bryan, who sat to my left, a figure as shaggy and comforting as the Cowardly Lion.

Seventeen of us were students, selected from the year's eighty or so applicants, and we came in all shapes, sizes, and ages. Rounding out the slate were Professor Landrum, his graduate assistant Wanda, and our first week's writer-in-residence, Algis Budrys himself—a figure of legend from the late Golden Age of science fiction, and author of the article that had first introduced me to the idea of Clarion. My awe at his presence in our prosaic little circle of folding chairs bordered on reverence.

Budrys called the meeting to order, instructing us to call him A.J. and asking each of us to introduce himself. As we proceeded around the circle, our brief and generic bios dropped to the floor like dead birds in the stale air. There was nothing to mark any of us as special, at least in anyone else's eyes. We remained each sullen and alone, halting and inarticulate in our isolation.

Even so, when my turn came and I announced in a piping voice that I was from Utah, questions pelted me from all sides. "Are you Mormon?" someone asked.

I did not want to admit that I was, but my conscience screamed at me that I must. How many times had I heard lessons and sermons berating those ashamed to confess their belief in Christ? "Well . . . yes."

"What's a Mormon doing writing science fiction?" asked someone else.

"Yeah, I thought that was against the rules or something," said another anonymous face, throwing down the words like a gauntlet.

"Orson Scott Card is Mormon," I said. "And so's that guy who created Battlestar Galactica."

"God, I hated that show."

"I just sold a story to an anthology of Mormon science fiction," I said, stretching the truth just a tiny bit.

"It somehow doesn't seem like Mormons should be writing science fiction," someone said.

"That's actually sort of what my dad thinks." I was trying to field everyone's comments, like a novice tennis player darting from one side of the court to the other.

"You still live at home?"

"Uh-huh."

"You're how old again?"

"Seventeen."

"And your parents let you come here anyway?"

"Well, my dad didn't really want me to come."

"So are you, like, in trouble?"

"Not really, not exactly. He let me apply thinking there was no way I'd get in."

"He told you that?"

"After I got accepted, yeah. He said he wouldn't have let me apply if he thought I was actually going to get in. But then he had to let me come."

"You don't have a problem being Mormon and writing science fiction?"

"Not really," I said, exhausted, and the storm had pretty much blown itself out. Time to move on from the tall skinny kid with the big glasses to fresher pickings.

But as the circle moved on, I was left to realize, for really the first time, how alien my religion, my beliefs, must look to people on the outside. I had my handful of non-Mormon friends growing up, but, at least since the age of six, I had always been part of the majority, and everyone else's beliefs had always been the weird ones, the deviant ones, the mockable ones. Now the shoe was on the other foot. The gentiles here far outnumbered me, and I was the lone defender of my people, my culture, my faith, which everyone around me, even with the best of intentions, would like to tear down and destroy. They would set themselves no more sacred mission than to root out, set fire to, and trample into the dust my testimony of Christ, rendering me a cold-hearted, amoral, and hellbound atheist. Misery, after all, loves company, and no one is more miserable than an atheist.

I had been taught that this would happen someday, but now I would truly be put to the test. I hoped to prove equal to the task.

#

A word about Mormonism and science fiction:

I'm still not sure why people find it so difficult to associate Mormonism and science fiction, when those of us with an intimate knowledge of both worlds see such a natural connection between the two. Perhaps the traditional and widely perceived antipathy between science and religion lies at the root of this misconception. After all, a literature based (largely but not entirely) on the thesis of humankind's manifest supremacy in the universe can hardly coexist peacefully with the idea of God.

But Mormons occupy a unique territory in the landscape of theology. They believe that God lives on a planet orbiting a star called Kolob, where one day equals a thousand of our earthly years. They believe that God has created numberless worlds besides our own and populated them with beings just like us. They believe that, should they remain true and faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ, they will have the chance to become gods themselves in the next life, with the power to create and populate worlds of their own.

These are not things you'll hear right off the bat when the missionaries come knocking at your door, but they are nonetheless genuine Mormon beliefs, which means that Mormons are exposed from childhood to a mind-boggling cosmic vista of possibility and potential. Not every Mormon, of course, discovers an affinity for science fiction—many unthinkingly accuse it of the same crimes my father did, and the best of it certainly challenges the fundamental doctrines of any church—but the ones who make that leap tend to embrace the genre with almost religious zeal. They seem to welcome the challenge like they would a good argument, and even find their faith enriched by it. Perversely, many of these Mormon SF aficionados strike me as more down-to-earth and reasonable in their commerce with the worldly world than their "mundane" brethren.

In 1987, for instance, I made the acquaintance of a rural Mormon bishop by the name of Jaeger. He didn't merely find science fiction to be good recreational reading—he credited it with enabling him to comprehend Mormon doctrine at all. "The Gospel is full of these abstract concepts that I just didn't get when I was growing up," he told me. "But when I started reading science fiction, I started seeing dramatic illustrations of these scientific concepts like relativity and gravity, and I started developing the ability to deal with abstract ideas. And that's when the Gospel clicked for me."

On another occasion Bishop Jaeger confided to me, "You know, Elder Shunn, it's awfully difficult to be a bishop in a small little town like this. I'm supposed to tell all my young men around here that they can only date Mormon girls? How can I do that in good conscience? You've seen the girls here at church. Most all of them are dogs!"

But that's another story.

#

Beginning the next morning, we settled into our routine. Our workshop sessions ran from nine until one, Monday through Saturday. Each started with an hour-long lecture from A.J., after which we would unleash our tender mercies on the victims of the day—those poor unfortunates with new stories to offer up on the altar of sacrifice. While the author of the work under consideration sat mute, we would go around the circle, each participant in turn tendering his or her opinion of the story—or, sometimes, of the author. One student named Bob, a Brooklyn native who rates as one of the three funniest people I have ever known, once led off a critique by saying, "You know, the best thing you could do for the sake of art would be to cut off your hands and bury your typewriter."

The process could be brutal, but at least we flung our slings and arrows at one another in comfort. On the first Monday morning, we decided as a group to abandon our bilious yellow basement room in favor of the main lobby of Phillips Hall, with its overstuffed couches and armchairs. We called this impromptu classroom the Lounge, and it was so comfy that I frequently nodded off during workshop sessions. When once we found the Lounge occupied, we repaired to the lobby of Snyder Hall, a dormitory that sits behind Phillips Hall but faces the opposite direction, like its giant mirror image. We dubbed that lobby the Anti-Lounge, and before long it had become our preferred venue, perhaps because it felt less like we were holding class in our own home.

We could reach the Anti-Lounge without ever setting foot aboveground by sneaking into a wide passageway that led from the basement of Phillips Hall to the basement of Snyder Hall. From there, we could also get into the underground steam tunnels that honeycomb the Michigan State campus, though to my knowledge none of us went exploring there. These are the same tunnels where sixteen-year-old prodigy James Dallas Egbert III holed up during his famous disappearance in 1979. Popular rumor blamed his disappearance on the sinister side effects of his immersion in the role-playing world of Dungeons & Dragons, when in actuality he was suffering from depression born of the impossible expectations of his family and his confused sexual identity. He eventually turned up in Louisiana, but shot himself in the head a year later.

Maybe that's why we all avoided the steam tunnels, where exploration might otherwise have been damn enticing.

#

I enjoyed our workshop sessions immensely, at least when I was awake, largely because I hadn't yet managed to complete a new story and thus had not sampled the particular joy of having someone point out with ecclesiastical fervor that I had used it's where I should have used its. But to sit there in the Lounge every morning amidst that many highly intelligent, articulate, witty, and opinionated people was like being David Banner in a bath of gamma radiation. I felt as if I were soaking up ideas and techniques powerful enough to change me into the Incredible Hulk.

People even seemed to take most of my comments seriously—except for the day I made the mistake of illustrating a point about narrative technique with an example from a book by Piers Anthony. Such hoots of derision arose at my choice of reading material that I immediately reclassified his writing as juvenile hackwork not fit for use as toilet paper, and to this day I have not been able to pick up another of his novels. (In fact, the very week of my return home from Clarion, I boxed up all thirty or forty of my Piers Anthony novels and took them down to the used-book buyer at Cosmic Aeroplane.) I figured that meant I was growing up.

Our afternoons and evenings were reserved for writing, and for reading the stories on the docket for the next day's excruciation. Of course, we also used this time for other activities—staring at blank computer screens, gazing out windows, wandering the halls with glazed expressions while threads of drool trembled from the corners of our mouths. (This is what's called the "writing process," and if I'd bottled all the drool I've spilled over the years while I should have been writing, we could all drink a healthy toast to Dame Saliva, the muse of wordsmiths.) We also affixed blotters to the walls to scrawl graffiti on and played innocent pranks on each other, but by far the most characteristic behavior we exhibited was something we called "schooling."

I'm not talking about getting an education. I'm talking about what fish do—drifting about from place to place in large groups with the appearance of willfulness. As divisive and iconoclastic as we could be in our workshop sessions, as wildly divergent as our clothes, our hairstyles, our backgrounds were, we still had far more in common with each other than we did with anyone else on campus, so when any of us ventured away from the dorm we tended to do so in clumps and clusters. Need lunch? Let's travel by fours. Want to see a movie? Must take eight or more. Shop for books? Can't be done with fewer than eleven.

Oh, how East Lansing trembled to see our boisterous pack roaming the sidewalks of Grand River Avenue! Wary crowds parted to let us through. Cigarette-smoking frat boys stepped aside nervously, trying not to look like they were giving ground. Merchants quietly turned the signs in their shops and restaurants from Open to Closed, and mothers gathered their children to their breasts with reproachful looks.

We were isolated, castaways in our dormant volcano of a residence hall, pariahs among civilized humans, and thank God for it. Otherwise, we might have had no reason to come together the way we did, to cling to one another like lost astronauts floating in space.

#

Late that first week, an unusually small school of us—Geoff, Martha, and me—were returning from lunch at one of the few cafeterias in operation on campus during the summer. We were engaged in a favorite Clarion pastime—talking about those not present behind their backs. In particular, Martha was holding forth on the men of Clarion '85, one by one. A 25-year-old Chicago native, Martha ranked as the champion talker of our group, which might have been unbearable except that she at least had the grace to be interesting as she ran roughshod over all other conversation. "And then there's Bob," she said. "That Bob is one of the two really attractive men at Clarion."

I found this a strange turn of conversation, since Martha was one of the three married women among us. But Geoff found it more than merely strange. "Oh, come on—Bob?" he said. "You must be joking."

"Why would I joke?"

Geoff, with his scraggly copper beard and perpetually quizzical expression, was the epitome of the mild-mannered scientist. He was the only published writer among us, but he was such a nice guy we hung out with him despite that. "Who's the other one then?"

Martha was momentarily stricken dumb. She glanced at me, then looked away just as quickly. "I don't know," she said. "I . . . really don't think I ought to say."

Geoff practically bounced, like a kid pestering his mother for a treat. "Come on, Martha. You have to tell us now."

But Martha refused to say anything more on the subject, no matter how much Geoff hounded her. I kept my tongue as well, pleased but little flustered and confused, and wondered just how interesting this summer would shape up to be.

#

This was East Lansing, early on a summer Sunday morning: brown, brown, everywhere grainy brown, like the dust from an old sepia photograph risen into the air, floating like sandpapery motes in the smoky brown sunlight. Houses and trees all around, viewed through a hazy screen of brown. An asphalt street, rendered soft and brown as a dirt road by this peculiar filter of my memory. I could almost smell the brown.

This is me as part of that scene: a study in brown. And lost.

#

A few days earlier, I had looked up the local Mormon meetinghouse in the Yellow Pages, called it, and asked for directions and service times. I set out on foot first thing Sunday morning, wearing a tie and jacket, scriptures in a zippered case under my arm. Directions notwithstanding, I was thoroughly lost in a prewar residential neighborhood within twenty minutes. The day cannot possibly have been as brown as I recall, but for some reason that's how it looks and smells in my memory.

I topped a hill, certain the church had to be somewhere nearby. A neatly bearded stranger, dressed in white shirt, tie, and tweed jacket, was approaching. One of the few people out and about, he carried a leather-bound book and seemed to have an important but not urgent destination. As he drew near, I could see the clear outline of a scoop-necked undergarment beneath his white shirt.

Celestial smile, I thought to myself. Bingo.

"Pardon me," I said to him, pleased with my powers of observation and my clever deduction. "Are you by any chance Mormon?"

The man recoiled, wary. "Not a bit," he said with distaste.

#

At some point in their lives, usually before a mission or marriage, worthy Mormon men and women undergo a special ritual called the endowment ceremony. I didn't know much about the endowment at that time, only that it took place in special sacred buildings called temples and that you weren't supposed to talk about the ceremony outside the temple. Oh, yes—and that after your endowment you had to wear special underwear called garments for the rest of your life.

I had seen garments, of course. My parents wore them, so it wasn't unusual to see my father slouching around the house in nothing but. Garments looked like normal white underwear, at least for the men, except that the briefs reached to your knees and the top had a scoop neck so they wouldn't show if your collar was open. They came in both one- and two-piece varieties. They also had arcane marks stitched into the fabric right over the nipples. I knew the marks symbolized something or other, but I had no idea what.

Garments for women were similar, if a little more frilly, but the really strange thing was that you were required to wear your garments next to your skin, with nothing between. That meant that the garment had to go on first, with the bra, panty hose, and whatever else going on over it. I can't imagine a more uncomfortable Christian dress code, unless you want to join the Amish and throw a floor-length skirt, a long-sleeved blouse, and a bonnet on over the top of that.

The scoop neck of the men's garment does leave a fairly visible signature, particularly if you have on a white dress shirt over it. Less reverent Mormons call that distinctive arc the "celestial smile," since you can't get into the Celestial Kingdom without it.

Thus my embarrassing mistake.

#

A further note on garment detection:

Because church leaders strongly urge young Mormon women to marry only returned missionaries in good standing, it becomes important for them to determine just how good that standing is. What I'm about to report is an unconfirmed urban legend, but I'm telling you anyway because it illustrates the sheer stature of the garment as an element of Mormon life, not to mention that it sheds some light on the preoccupations of Mormon youth. Besides, it's funny.

If a young man has returned from a mission and remains in good standing with the Church—in other words, has not confessed to any grievous sin of a carnal nature—then he will wear his garments beneath his clothing at all times, except when bathing or engaging in strenuous sporting activities. Thus, if a young man claiming to be a returned missionary should ask a young woman out on a date, she can determine the truth of his claim and the status of his membership by placing her hand on his leg just above the knee and feeling for the hem of his garment. If she finds the hem, then she can feel confident enough about the young man's intentions that she might just let him make out with her, or even go a little farther than that. Rumor would have it that some of the young ladies at Brigham Young University do just that.

Rumor would also have it that certain unscrupulous young men at Brigham Young University, hoping to get to first or second base but lacking the requisite underclothes, will wrap masking tape several times around their legs just above the knees, to simulate that magic hemline.

Honest to God, that's what I've heard.

#

It turned out that the stranger with the fake celestial smile did have a vague notion of where I needed to go. "I think the Mormons are down that street a few blocks," he said with an indeterminate little wave. I thanked him and continued on my way.

I found the meetinghouse a few minutes later. If it were standing in a police lineup with other neighborhood churches, I could have picked it out as a Mormon structure with no problem. In my experience, only the Catholics and the Scientologists retain as much centralized control over church affairs as the Mormons do, and that extends even to the architectural plans for their buildings. The basic look and feel of Mormon meetinghouses has evolved only slightly over my lifetime, and it would appear that only a handful of different blueprints are used in the construction of new chapels around the globe at any one time.

In fact, the Mormon church employs men with the title "church architect" to design all its buildings and monuments. This position seems to occupy a nebulous territory somewhere between job and holy calling. The goal, of the architecture as well as of the curricular materials of the church, seems to be that a Mormon can walk into any meetinghouse anywhere in the world and feel instantly at home, with similar lessons being taught in similar surroundings. It's the religious equivalent of McDonald's.

I sat quietly near the back of the chapel during sacrament meeting. There must have been three or four hundred people present—good attendance even so far from Utah—and, like at any Mormon service, the numerous babies and small children in the congregation made quite a racket. After an opening prayer and hymn, the bishop made a series of announcements. Another hymn followed, after which the young priests blessed bread and water for the sacrament ordinance, and the even younger deacons lined up to distribute the small morsels to the congregation on stainless steel trays.

After that came two or three sermons, delivered by regular ward members. Officially the Mormons have no paid clergy—although the higher you rise in the hierarchy the larger your expense allowance grows, and the greater your participation as a shareholder in the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But for all practical purposes, a bishop receives no compensation for the time he devotes to church business, and he continues to hold down a regular job during his term of service, which is normally three to five years. It is neither practical nor desirable for him to offer a long sermon every Sunday, so he or his counselors assign random folks from the ward every week to prepare and deliver talks on gospel topics over the pulpit. Not only does this relieve the bishop of an onerous duty, it also gives all the members of the ward the opportunity to hone their public-speaking skills—invaluable experience for those who will go on to become leaders themselves . . . and for those who will go on to serve missions.

When sacrament meeting ended and everyone was filing out of the chapel, the ward clerk—who had spotted me as a visitor while taking attendance notes—introduced himself and placed me in the care of two young blonde women a little older than I. He asked them to show me to the Sunday school class for young adults.

I have long forgotten these girls' real names. From the moment I met them, I thought of them as Laurel and Hardy, and those designations have replaced all other labels in the files of my memory. Both girls were students at Michigan State. The first was just a bit too tall, thin, and horse-faced for me to find attractive, and the second just a bit too short, round, and moon-faced. Besides that, they giggled all the time. They seemed far more interested in my Utah background and future mission plans than in my Clarion studies, but they were pleasant enough company. The tall one came from Utah herself, a city called Logan, up north near the Idaho border. I believe she was studying something along the lines of agriculture.

I sat next to them during Sunday school, and they put their heads together and giggled softly during the lesson. After class, the tall one said, "Why don't you come over to the Institute with us sometime this week?"

"Yes," said the short one. "They have Foosball and a pool table. Do you play?"

I did shoot pool. I gave the girls the phone number for the dorm, and told them they could find me at Phillips Hall.

How unexpected. Only two hours at church, and it seemed I had a date already. Two, actually. Joseph Smith would have been proud.

#

During our second week of Clarion, a popular novelist named Joe joined us as writer-in-residence. That was a week of colorful lectures and odd writing exercises, such as the day we each drew a slip of paper with a scientific concept on it from one hat and one with a verse scheme from another and had to compose a poem that blended the two—say, a Petrarchan sonnet on the subject of entropy.

I turned in a rather a silly short story that week, told from the point of view of the apple that fell on Isaac Newton's head. I was cheating—this was a gag story, science fiction at its most hackneyed and trivial, and it received only a lukewarm response from the workshop. But it also relieved me of the pressure to submit something for critiquing while I worked on my magnum opus, the story that would blow everyone away and demonstrate what a prodigy I was.

Every afternoon I sat down to write—and every afternoon something seemed to come up that not only distracted me but seemed designed to test my Mormon ideals.

#

That was the week Bob and I became friends. As brash and charismatic as he was funny, Bob was the only one in a wide field of challengers who could talk over Martha. They were destined either to love or hate each other, and maybe both. A 27-year-old Irish-Italian New Yorker, Bob came across as well-read, well-traveled, and supremely self-confident. The only way to consistently get a rise out of him was to make fun of his Brooklyn accent. On the subject of his accent, Bob had no "sensayuma."

On our afternoon food expeditions, our group tried to sample a different restaurant every day. I don't recall many of the meals we ate, but I do remember a startling fact: every restaurant contained a prominent and well-stocked bar. If I needed any reminder that I was a tourist in a hostile and alien land, that was it. That a tender young 17-year-old like myself could be admitted to an establishment that so blatantly purveyed alcoholic beverages came as a shock to my rather sheltered sensibilities. Nothing of the kind was permitted in Utah, where the liquor laws are as incomprehensible and arcane as Middle English—and largely dictated by the Mormon church, which exerts an discomfiting influence over most arms of state government. I'd had no reason to suspect until now that other states might view the sale of alcohol differently. It reminded me how fortunate I was to grow up where I did, and how inured people had become to the casual evils that ruled so thoroughly everywhere else.

Bob made a habit of ordering beer from a different country at every meal, and he would always pass the day's selection around the table for the benefit of those interested in joining him on his world brewery tour. I always declined, of course, which turned into a joke after the first few times, albeit a good-natured one. I was not just Mormon but underage too. No one seriously expected me to have a drink of beer, even if it did give Bob the perfect chance to tease me about my heartland values.

I took it in stride. I even enjoyed the attention. So far I was setting a pretty good example as an ambassador for my faith. But then again, I hadn't really been tested yet.

#

To attend Clarion, Bob had abandoned a job as an emergency-room security guard at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. He had also served in the Merchant Marine and the Coast Guard, and he did talk like the proverbial sailor. (I had never heard the word "douchebag" used in any context until I met Bob.) He once told me that no word I could utter could possibly offend him, and I never did succeed in proving him wrong. "There are definitely crude and offensive concepts out there," he told me, "but that's rarely a function of the words themselves."

Bob did succeed in offending me, however, one day in the men's corridor. A small group of us, comprising both men and women, had congregated there for casual talk, and the topic had somehow turned to masturbation. Bob was relating to us, in rather broad terms, his shipboard masturbatory habits, when he noticed the look of horror on my face. "Look," he said to me, "when you don't see a single solitary woman for six months at a time, you got two choices. You can either jerk off or go crazy."

It was the first time in my life I'd heard someone speak approvingly of masturbation. My friends back home brought it up all the time, of course, but it was always derisive and deprecatory talk, a big show meant to hide the fact that they were jerking off for all they were worth every night of the week. The guilt from my own forearm-strengthening exercises was heavy enough to crush a tank, which meant, strangely enough, that Bob's blasé take on the subject really rattled me.

So did his discursion on homosexuality. "You know, Bill," he said one day when he and I were talking alone, "you're a smart guy. How can you believe in a god that would make a person homosexual and then tell him it's a sin to follow his feelings? Send him to hell for doing what he was made to do?"

I wasn't sure where that had come from, but I wasn't exactly happy that Bob had launched another of his salvos against my faith. "What are you talking about?" I said. "God doesn't make people homosexual."

"If you believe that God makes people, then you have to believe He makes homosexuals too. And your church is going to kick them out just for being the way they are? Doesn't that strike you as rather un-Christlike?"

"I'm not the one kicking them out. They're kicking themselves out by the way they behave. A church isn't a democracy. It's got rules of behavior."

"If you support an organization like that with your money and your membership, then you're saying it's right and good to discriminate against homosexuals. Bill, have you ever thought about this, or are you just repeating things you've heard other people say?"

"I've thought about it."

"You've got to do more than that. You've got to study these kinds of issues, read up on the science, listen to both sides. Then you can decide what you believe in and what you stand for, and not let someone else do it for you."

I walked away from talks like this feeling uncertain and unsettled, like a tiny capsule of certitude buffeted by an ocean of immoral philosophy. I didn't really comprehend what Bob was up to until he told me a remarkable thing in the course of one of our gossip sessions. He and I were speculating on the various couplings, adulterous and otherwise, that might be going on amongst the other students, when he said, "I'll tell you, it's been my experience that the more promiscuous a person is, the more unhappy he tends to be."

As I was mulling over this strange statement later that night—strange coming from a fornicating gentile, anyway—it suddenly occurred to me that Bob lived by an ethical code every bit as strict as mine, and that, wittingly or not, when we weren't ambushing people with water pistols he was teaching it to me. It also occurred to me, for a heretical moment, that Bob's idea of moral responsibility was higher than any I'd heard in church, because it was founded in a profound respect for fellow humanity and not in any fear of punishment or hope for reward.

I shook off the thought almost immediately. No doubt Bob means well, I told myself, but I won't fall for it. If it sounds reasonable and pretty, that's because Satan dolls his lies up in fine clothes and sends them out to tickle the ears and excite the intellect. He's a master of deception.

But I know what's right. I can think for myself. I won't be fooled.

#

Late that week, Laurel and Hardy stopped by the dorm to pick me up for our pool date. I introduced the girls to two or three of the other students who were lounging about, but instead of enthusiasm my guests were greeted with standoffishness and even a little unfriendliness. It didn't occur to me until later that we had been creating a secure little unified world at Clarion, and that the girls were outsiders. By swooping down and spiriting me away, they threatened that world, reminded the others that I still had one foot on a plane completely separate from theirs.

The girls drove me to the LDS Institute of Religion, a huge old converted house off-campus that in an alternate universe might have made some sorority a fine home. The Mormon church maintains these religious schools near more than 1,200 college campuses in the United States and Canada. Each offers a slate of classes on a variety of doctrinal topics, easily meshed into a student's regular college schedule. Instructors, at least at the larger Institutes, are paid employees of the Church Educational System.

The East Lansing Institute was nowhere near as large or elaborate as the one at the University of Utah—which is, in fact, the largest Institute in existence, housed in a complex of immaculate beige brick buildings, and servicing as much as half the university's student body. (Of course, the only reason the U has the largest is because there is no Institute at Brigham Young University. Religion classes are part of the required curriculum there, so there's really no need.)

The church strongly encourages its college students to take at least one Institute class every term, not only for the sake of religious instruction but also for the fellowship and company of other Mormons—and, not to mention, as a nostrum for the godless philosophies being proclaimed on-campus. I had sampled a couple of Institute classes myself. My first quarter in college, I took the basic Religion 121, first in a full-year series covering the entire Book of Mormon. But the Institute was a long walk across campus, and I lost interest by the third or fourth week and stopped going.

The next quarter, determined to make a better showing, I signed up for something that sounded more intriguing, a 300-level course on the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. I even volunteered to play the piano accompaniment for the hymn at the beginning of class—every classroom had an upright—just so I'd be obligated to keep attending. But that didn't work either. My attendance tailed off again around the third week, and by midterm I had stopped going entirely.

My parents hoped I would take enough classes during college to earn an Institute diploma, but even that first year I knew it wasn't going to happen. I had reached saturation. Going to church every Sunday was about all I could do—after four years of seminary, I'd had more than enough religion classes for a lifetime.

Seminary is another program of the Church Educational System; it is the high school equivalent of Institute. The main difference is that it's much more difficult to avoid signing up for and attending seminary. Your parents pressure you to go. Your bishop pressures you to go. Your classmates pressure you to go. And if you don't go, everyone can tell that your priorities have slipped out of whack.

In parts of the U.S. and Canada where the Mormon population is relatively insignificant, students from ninth grade on attend seminary classes in the morning before school. Early in the morning, as in six-thirty or seven. Every day of the week. Kids in Utah have things a little easier thanks to the "released-time" law, which permits public school students to be released from normal educational obligations for one class period every day—a class period of your own choosing—expressly to receive religious instruction. For this reason, you will find a seminary building adjacent to nearly every high school in the state, just over the property line, and hordes of teenagers streaming into and out of it on every class break.

After a year of Old Testament, a year of New Testament, a year of Book of Mormon, and a year of Church History, I earned a diploma from the Kaysville Seminary. So did ninety percent of the kids I knew. And what did that mean?

As far as I was concerned, it meant I had put in my time. With that two-year full-time mission looming, I wanted to maximize the time left for my own pursuits. Institute classes could go hang.

#

One side effect of the released-time law is, of course, that non-Mormon students can use the same loophole. I had a few friends who attended classes at the Catholic seminary every day, but the trickle back and forth to that building was so thin that you couldn't guess its endpoint unless you already knew. (Actually, I never did learn where the Catholic seminary is located, sad to report.)

I've always wondered if an atheist student could exploit the law to get out of class for instruction in godlessness. I would find that splendidly entertaining. If anyone ever tries, they'll have my support.

#

After a few games of eight-ball in the Institute's student lounge, plus some cold root beer and pleasant enough conversation, the girls brought me back to my dorm. I didn't invite them in again. What would have been the point? Utah was overflowing with Mormon girls, and that vast selection would still be waiting when I got home from Clarion. Laurel and Hardy had done nothing to distinguish themselves from that teeming mass, besides being familiar and available in a distant land. For now, I was living among people who shared a different set of my beliefs, and I wouldn't have that again after I returned to Utah.

I don't think I made this decision consciously, but from then on I confined my social activities to my new circle of science fiction friends. I wanted to maximize the short time I would have to spend with them.

One thing this meant was seeing a lot of movies I might not otherwise have attended—most of them (with the notable exception of the Disneyfied version of Lloyd Alexander's young adult novel The Black Cauldron) rated R. Attending R-rated movies was still a bit of a novelty for me. I believe it was the Mormon prophet Spencer W. Kimball who instructed church members never to view R-rated material, and my parents had always strictly enforced that guideline with me. They didn't even take my sisters and me to see our first PG-rated movie, The Bad News Bears, until I was eight or nine. I didn't even believe my sister Seletha when she tried to tell me the movie was rated PG. "Mom and Dad don't take us to PG movies," I told her.

"Then why was there all that swearing?" she said.

She had me there.

My first R-rated movie was The Star Chamber, which I attended at the age of fifteen with my friend Chad Willis and his parents. Chad's mother also happened to teach elementary school, and with one of my sisters in her class she warned me not to tell my parents that she had gotten me into an R-rated movie.

But I broke. Racked with guilt, I confessed to my mother later that week.

Oddly enough, she didn't punish me. Mrs. Willis got off easy too, as far as I know.

#

That was 1983, and we'd had to go to Layton, the next town over, to see the show. Kaysville had only one theater, and it never even showed an R-rated movie until late in 1984, when profits were low and ownership changed hands. Beverly Hills Cop was the first, and you should have seen all the ladies with nothing better to do who turned out to picket!

I turned out, too—to see movie, along with half the kids I knew from school. This was a historic occasion for our little town. No way were we going to miss out.

#

Gradually I came to realize that a movie's rating has little or nothing to do with its quality or morality, and the power of the prophet's pronouncement evaporated for me. I still tended to avoid the edgier fare at the Blue Mouse, however, so I had never witnessed for myself the campy spectacle of The Rocky Horror Picture Show when the invitation to go see it came from Martha.

Rocky Horror played at the Blue Mouse in Salt Lake at midnight every Friday and Saturday, so I had of course heard about the costumes, the flying toast, the squirt bottles, the comic lines and the playacting—and that was just the audience part, all timed to mesh with the action on the big screen! But my friends and I had never quite dared to attend and see what all the fuss was about. Now here was Martha, offering a foray in the company of half a dozen or more of my Clarion compatriots. What could be safer?

"What's it like?" I asked nervously. "I've heard a lot about it, but . . . you know . . ."

"It's a sad, beautiful movie about loneliness and alienation," said Martha. "Try to ignore what's going on in the audience. None of them really understand it."

Sometime after eleven that night, eight or nine of us piled into two cars—a few of the students had driven to Clarion, hundreds if not thousands of miles—and headed over to a huge barn of a movie theater on the edge of Lansing proper, with a parking lot the size of Rhode Island. The theater could probably have seated eight hundred people; for the midnight movie, it was lucky to have gotten forty. Those of us from Clarion spread out in clumps. I ended up sitting with Bob, who was also a first-timer.

A group of teenagers in costumes milled at the front of the theater, beneath the giant blind eye of the screen. Two of them, a boy and a girl, had dressed themselves like a bridal couple, him in black tuxedo, her in lace and white veil. As midnight approached, the couple made their way up the aisle from the front, stopping to talk to various audience members. When I saw them say something to Geoff, whom surely they didn't know, I said to Bob, "What's going on?"

"Beats me."

We found out a few moments later, when the two kids reached our fellow student Kim, sitting a couple of rows ahead of us. Kim was twenty-two, a painfully shy South Dakotan girl with an almost inaudible voice who wrote gripping, blood-curdling horror stories. Kim was sitting alone. Bob and I leaned forward to hear what the couple said to her.

The boy spoke. "Hi there. We were just wondering if you'd ever been to see this movie before."

Face lowered, Kim looked up at them with her haunted eyes and shook her head a little—just the merest vibration, really.

The couple backed away a step, made a great show of pointing their fingers at her, and shouted at the tops of their lungs: "Virgin! Virgin!"

Kim's face blazed red, and she hunched down so far in her seat she seemed to be trying to become one with the gum and spilled soda on the theater floor.

Greatly pleased with themselves, the teenagers continued up the aisle. The next stop was our row.

They were a couple of years younger than me, and I was so appalled at their behavior I could barely look at them. But they trained their attention on Bob, who had the aisle seat. "Hey there," said the boy. "Just wondering if you've ever seen the movie before."

Bob sat completely relaxed in his chair, slouched like a lazy snake. He cocked an eyebrow at the boy without really looking at him, then said with dead seriousness in his best Brooklyn accent: "You call me a virgin, I'll rip your fucking lungs out."

The boy's face turned white beneath his rouged cheeks. His mouth chewed a moment on empty air. He looked at me, seemed to think better of his question, then tugged the girl on past us without another word.

#

The movie and all its attendant foofaraw got underway a few minutes later. The musical numbers were fun, I enjoyed the way the audience's lines turned the on-screen dialogue into self-deprecating parody, and I derived some cruel satisfaction from the scene where Tim Curry serves Meat Loaf for supper. But overall the movie's cheerful subversion of conventional sexuality disturbed me, despite Bob's lessons in open-mindedness. Frank, a fellow from Washington who could be flamboyantly provocative one moment and inscrutably prudish the next, declared the movie the most pornographic piece of filth he had ever seen.

"You need to see it without the audience," said Martha, plodding dejectedly through the warm night air to where our cars were parked. "You just can't get the point with all that distraction around."

That was a Friday night. Two days later was church. As I was making my way through the crowded hallway before sacrament meeting, I spotted the young groom from the movie theater walking toward me. Our eyes met, and for a brief moment his terrified expression returned. Then he looked down at the floor and hurried past me.

In the service that followed, he helped the other members of the Aaronic Priesthood prepare the sacrament for blessing and distribution.

Where I come from, we call that "ironic priesthood."

#

It didn't really have anything to do with that incident, but that also turned out to be the last Sunday during my Clarion tenure that I attended church.

It's not that I had anything against church, really—not then. It's just that there were so many other interesting things for me to do, I didn't want to waste the time.

Already, the summer days seemed slippery and fleeting.

#

During the third and fourth weeks, things at the workshop started to get out of hand. People grew less cautious in the wording of their critiques. Feelings were hurt. Tempers flared. Cliques began to form. Cruel graffiti appeared on the walls. Pranks, which had always abounded, took on a darker, more mean-spirited edge, and a couple of people flirted with the notion of quitting the workshop and going home.

I was never one of the quitters. Even on the days when I was most convinced that my attempts to produce a golden literary egg were only fouling the nest, I never once wanted to pack my bags and leave. I was where I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, and no matter how hard it was, I was going to do it.

Not that there weren't distractions. First and foremost was the idea, planted in my head by a jealous classmate, that my journey to Michigan had somehow transformed me into a chick magnet.

"God, I hate you," said Joseph to me one evening as we ate a late supper at a nearby Burger King.

I swallowed the bite of Whopper that had suddenly turned to a tasteless lump in my mouth. "Uh, why?" I asked him.

Joseph was a scientific and musical genius, nineteen years old, who looked enough like me that I thought we could have been mistaken for brothers. He let out a short, put-upon sigh. "That really cute blonde at the counter," he said. "You get a big warm smile, sparkly eyes, how are you, what can I do for you, thank you very much, have a wonderful evening, I want to have your babies—and then my turn comes, and she hardly looks at me."

"Joseph, I think you're imagining things," I said, though it secretly thrilled me to think he was right.

"Please. You walk by and panties hit the ground left and right."

"Not that I've noticed."

"Oh, trust me," said Joseph. "Every woman at Clarion wants to jump your bones."

I almost choked. "What?"

"Yeah. Makes me want to puke. And the pisser is, you're a goddamn Mormon and can't even do anything about it!"

Lying in bed that night, I thought long and hard about what Joseph had said. And by the time I was done, boy, was my forearm tired.

#

That conversation changed everything. Every day during our workshop session, I peered surreptitiously around the circle at each of those older women and tried to banish the carnal thoughts that assaulted me. Every evening, huddled under the covers with visions of cheesecake dancing in my head, I performed my nightly exercises, and I tried not to think about the maid whose job it was to change the sheets each morning. I stumbled through my days under a jumbled cloud of fantasy and guilt. I grew surly and snappish, and I started withdrawing from the group.

The dam finally burst one day toward the end of the fourth week. A mixed group of us were easing our way from the Lounge to the men's side of the dorm, moving in that amoebalike way characteristic of crowds of half a dozen or more. I was the last one through the heavy fire door we had labeled with a warning about Y-chromosome poisoning. I was careless. The door closed on my hand. I didn't think. I uttered a short and vicious "Fuck!"

Half a dozen silent faces turned to stare at me. "Pardon me, could you repeat that?" said Bob. "I'm not sure I heard you right."

"Fuck!" I said again, shaking my injured hand like it was a chicken whose neck I was trying to break.

Martha rushed over to me, horrified, eyes wide as moon craters. "Oh, my God!" she said, completely ignoring my hand. "We've corrupted you!"

You'd have thought she'd accidentally shot me. "Judas Proust," I said. "You didn't corrupt me. I swear all the time."

"You don't have to try to make us feel better," said Martha. She fussed over me like a mother hen, as if there were something she could fix—other than my hand, that is. "My God, we've corrupted you, and now you're going to go home talking like us, and your family's never going to let you write science fiction again."

I pulled away with a jerk. "I don't talk like that at home," I said. I knew better. Once my sister Seletha had tattled on me for swearing—she heard about it from my cousin Dougie and saved up for a long time, until a day when she was really mad at me—and my father confronted me in the car on the way to school and he pulled over and screamed at me until he was red in the face: "If I ever hear of you using gutter language again, I'll blister your behind, you hear me? I won't have you growing up to be a gutter slut! Do you hear me? Do you want to be a gutter slut?" Right there at the curb in a quiet neighborhood, big trees all around, and nice little houses, and my father screaming at me in the front seat of a little yellow Toyota.

I didn't even know what a gutter slut was. But I never swore again where anyone in my family could hear about it.

My cheeks blazed. "I bet I've said fuck a hundred times," I told Martha and everyone else. Why was it that my father believed it so readily when someone reported that I'd sworn, and the people here didn't even believe me when they heard it for themselves? Wasn't that more than a little . . . well, fucked up?

"Sorry, Bill," said Bob, "but you're not in the club 'til you get to a thousand."

"Fuck you," I said.

"Keep practicing. You'll get there."

#

It was that same week that Martha and I started hanging out together more and more. Frankly, I'd been half-intentionally avoiding her since the first week. Martha had a husband, and she and Bob were flirting pretty hard, but still I got this strange vibe from her, a vibe that made me inexplicably uncomfortable. So I made like she was a wild horse in a big corral, and I tried to stay on the prudent side of the fence.

But then Martha wandered through the Lounge one afternoon while I was there alone. "Won't-You-Marry-Me Bill!" she said, employing with great relish one of the nicknames our fellow Clarion wags had recently hung 'round my neck. (Another was "Young Henry Fonda." Apparently Joseph wasn't the only observer reaching interesting conclusions watching people watching me.)

"Hey, Martha," I said.

She took a seat across from me. "We haven't really had much chance to talk since that first week. I think that's a shame."

"It is." Warily I set aside the manuscript I'd been reading. The wild horse breaks loose.

"You're one of the more interesting people here, and in this crowd that's really saying something. The Mormon who writes science fiction."

"It's really not that strange."

"You say."

So we chatted, and Martha told me about her theater group in Chicago, about writing and performing her own material, about growing up with her younger twin sisters, about the world of hardcore science fiction fandom, about the eternal optimism of Cubs fans, about her attempts and repeated failures to establish contact with God. And you know what? I discovered I liked her. I did. Another unbeliever turns out to be a genuinely good person. Unbelievable.

Late in the conversation, Martha said, "You remember during the first week, when you and I were walking back from lunch with Geoff, and he kept bugging me about who the other guy was I thought was attractive?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, with a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach.

"Did you figure out why I wasn't telling?"

My eyes shifted to the left, to the right. "I . . . think so."

"If that's what you thought, then I just wanted to let you know that you were right. It was you."

"Gosh," I said.

"Not fuck?"

I laughed.

"I didn't want to make you uncomfortable or anything," said Martha. "I'm sorry if I did. But you are a really great guy. I kind of feel like you could be my kid brother. I never had a brother. I always wanted one."

And that was how I acquired a big sister named Martha.

#

Early in the fifth week of Clarion, I finally turned in the big story I'd been working on for so long—a thorough rewrite of that timeless masterpiece, "Deus ex Machina." Wanda distributed copies in the workshop the next morning. Late that evening, I ran into Bryan in the dim hallway outside my room. "Did you get a chance to read my story yet?" I asked.

"I did," said Bryan.

I had just spent more than three weeks, over half my time at Clarion, working on the damn thing. I was desperate that it go over well. I was desperate not to have wasted that time. I was desperate to be taken seriously.

I was desperate to know what Bryan thought, so I asked him.

"I think you're a genius," said Bryan, nodding his shaggy head. "I think everyone's going to be jealous of you tomorrow."

I sagged with relief. "Thanks," I said.

Still, I slept fitfully that night.

#

Perhaps I couldn't sleep because I had some inkling of what was coming in the morning.

Let's not pussyfoot around here. The criticism was brutal. As we went around the circle, each observation, each opinion, each aspersion hit me like a solid belt to the gut, and my only job was to hold myself upright for receiving the next blow. The story was trash, it was worse than puerile, bloody civil wars had been sparked over lesser affronts, I should be sentenced to a thousand years forced labor for the very thought of inflicting such an execration on an unsuspecting and innocent world. As Wanda Larrier so neatly summed things up in her remarks, "Reading this story, I felt like all of Western civilization was collapsing on my head."

And then it was Bryan's turn—Bryan, who had predicted such showers of praise the night before. Hunched over on the sofa across from me, staring at me in my electric chair through hollow eyes, mournful as a hound keeping watch over his master's dead body, Bryan said, "I told you last night I thought this was a work of genius." He compressed his lips. "I read it as a satire, a brilliant send-up of all the clichés the genre has accreted." He looked at the floor. "Apparently no one else read it that way." He looked at me again. "But it's not a satire. You were sincere, right?"

I nodded, blinking hard.

Bryan nodded as well. "I'm sorry," he said quietly.

#

When the workshop session broke up, I walked stiffly toward my room. My organs felt sore inside me, battered by a rising tide of grief.

"Sorry about the critique," said Rob, offering a handshake in the hallway. Rob was like an M & M candy: arch, academic, and brittle on the outside, sweet but dark on the inside. We had shared some searching discussions of his Catholicism in the weeks before, and a lot of tasteless jokes too. "I guess it would have been kinder of me to have passed, instead of rehashing the same drubbing you got from everyone else."

Bob and Martha and a few others were walking by. "I'm not sorry," said Bob. "We still like you, but the story sucked out loud. You had to hear that."

"My love for you is still entirely profane," said Martha.

Bob snorted. "I'm sure that's a comfort to the kid."

"Bob, my love for you is spiritual. You're just jealous."

"Well, I can do something about it."

"No, you can't."

I tuned out all the good-natured bickering, kept my head down and made it to my room without falling to pieces. I stood with my back against the door, eyes closed, breathing hard. It was just a story, just criticism. I could take it. No problem.

Knock.

"Hey, it's Bryan," said Bryan. "You there?"

I opened the door. Bryan filled the frame.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

I nodded. "I'm fine."

His eyes narrowed with concern as he peered down at my face. "Are you sure?"

I only made it halfway through another nod before the grief reached flood tide and spilled out.

Bryan, with the long hair and the walrus mustache—Bryan, with the strangely fragrant smoke that drifted out from his room while he wrote—Bryan, who couldn't walk down the street without muttering, "Nope, too young, nope, jailbait, nope"—Bryan, whose letters in the coming years would be filled with no-nonsense advice I should by God have listened to—Bryan, the godless, the gentile, the heathen, closed the door, put his arms around me, and held me while I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

#

I might not have been able to face the blank page again that week if not for Bryan's compassion and the support of all my other friends. As it was, I set to work within the next couple of days on a brand-new story, this one about a young woman who gets bitten by a mythical beast called a wyvern. When she begins transforming into a wyvern herself, she unwillingly kills her fiancé and disappears into the woods with the beast that bit her. A sweet little love story, really.

I worked feverishly in the dank swampland of my dorm room, where it was so humid that paper left out on the desk would curl up at the edges within a day. Early in the sixth week, when the story was finished, I slapped on the title "Talon Sinister," printed out a copy, and turned it in to Wanda. Then I retired to a bed of pins and needles to wait.

#

The group reacted far more favorably to "Talon Sinister" than they had to my previous submission. Of course, they could have folded paper airplanes from the pages of the manuscript, doused them in gasoline, and sailed them burning into an explosives warehouse, and it still would have been a kinder reception than "Deus ex Machina" got.

Most people liked this story reasonably well, including Kate and Damon, our teachers for the final two weeks of the workshop. When the student's critiques were done, Kate offered a surprising interpretation of what she had read. "This is a very beautiful story about a young girl's sexual awakening," she said. "She's tempted by safety and traditional roles, but the other path is wild, dangerous, irresistible—all-consuming, perhaps uncontrollable. I think this story shows remarkable improvement. In fact, it demonstrates that Bill is the most improved student this year at Clarion."

I guess that means I'd found an acceptable channel into which to redirect my illicit yearnings.

#

That Friday afternoon, we convened in Professor Landrum's back yard for a going-away barbecue. A.J. Budrys returned from his home in Illinois to join us, and between the food and the water fights and the nostalgia, we signed each other's copies of our Clarion anthology—a spiral-bound book containing each student's best story.

In the midst of the festivities, Martha called for silence. "I have a presentation to make," she said, bringing out a sheet of paper—a list of some kind, neatly printed up on the Macintosh computer she had brought with her from Chicago. "Where's Bill? There you are—don't run."

Abashed but pleased, I stepped forward from my hiding place behind Resa, the petite and intensely attractive woman I'd started hanging out with just that week. I suppose you could say that Resa and I were having an affair—she was a married woman, and twelve years my senior. But she was also funny and smart, with a core of sadness that drew me like dust to a static charge, and when we sat together and talked, we held hands shyly and never dared kiss. It was all very clumsy and innocent and inexplicable—a relationship that could never survive outside the atmosphere of Clarion, except in a bubble of fond and protective memory. Her husband probably wouldn't have understood, but I have a feeling Brian Wilson would.

"Young Master Shunn," Martha said as I stood before her, "in light of the terrible corrupting influences you've been exposed to as part of your Clarion experience, I think it's important for you review the following words and phrases you may have picked up from the rest of us, which you must under no circumstances permit to pass your lips after you've returned home to Utah. We'd hate to see you get arrested on our account, or banned from any further involvement with science fiction."

She handed me the list—headed "Words and Phrases You Must Never Use in Utah"—which read in part:

1. Fuck
2. Douchebag
3. Fuckin' douchebag
4. Shit
5. Asshole
6. Darn it
7. Heilige Scheiße!
8. Bend over, I'm driving
9. Any synonym of "penis"
10. Any synonym of "vagina"
11. Any synonym of "Bob"
12. Sucks out loud
13. My love for you is spiritual (depending on tone of voice)
14. My love for you is profane (ever)
15. I want to go home to Clarion

A notice at the bottom of the page read: A PUBLIC SERVICE OF THE MORMON REENTRY DRIVE.

"Shit," I said to Martha. "I think I'm going to cry."

#

Over the next two days, we dribbled away one by one, each of us slipping gently out of the dream that was Clarion and struggling back to consciousness as we entered the real world. Waking to discover that Clarion was over, forever, just like that, before we'd had a chance to make sense of it. Waking to wonder if it could possibly have happened the way we remembered it, or if some fever had clarified ordinary events, prosaic friendships, into something too poignant and perfect to exist outside the pages of a book, like the world viewed through a teardrop.

I left Clarion on Saturday, August 3rd, 1985—eleven days short of my eighteenth birthday. Before I left, I made the rounds of the dorm, where the petty squabbles and deadly enmities of the previous weeks had been summarily suspended. Wanda, all six glorious feet of her, told me I wasn't getting away without a hug, and crushed me to her chest. Joseph wished me a desultory and awkward goodbye, though I think we were both more unhappy to be saying farewell than we let show. I embraced Bob like a brother, Martha like a sister, and Bryan like a father. I embraced Geoff like, well, Geoff, and Resa like my very first prom date, knowing that the magic of our last slow dance together might never be recaptured. When the taxi arrived, I didn't want to get in. I felt like I was leaving the best parts of myself behind (though the truth is that I only misplaced them for a while).

After checking in at the airport and settling down in my seat on the plane, I affixed an I READ BANNED BOOKS button to my shirt and closed my eyes. The house on Westbrook Road loomed large in my mind, taking form in the grainy mental dawnlight, and already I could feel my recall of Clarion growing imperfect, drying and brittling like fall leaves.

Waking up was hard to do.

I returned from my two-week stint at B.Y.U. full of piss and vinegar. At least, that's what my parents seemed to think. As I dove into my senior year of high school, my parents complained to me more and more often -- and more and more bitterly -- about what a difficult and disrespectful young man I was becoming.

I honestly don't remember what I was doing that upset them so much. For difficulty and disrespect, I don't think I ever outdid my sister Seletha -- sorry, sis -- who was never afraid to stand her ground and wrangle furiously with our parents. (Though for all her independence, Seletha was never anything less than faithful in her adherence to gospel principles while we were growing up. I think it would have been easier for my parents to win any moral victories against her if she hadn't been such a straight-arrow.)

I can make some guesses as to what I did, though. I suppose I had won some measure of confidence during my time at B.Y.U., and since I could now legally drive and date, my friends both male and female were taking on a greatly increased importance in my life. As a consequence, I probably stayed out later than my parents would have liked, and I must have defied their warnings or outright bans against some of the friends I hung out with. I probably talked back to them as well.

Let's list some of the things that I wasn't doing at the time, just for a reality check. I wasn't drinking -- didn't have my first drink until I was twenty-eight, in fact. I wasn't smoking -- still haven't tried that particular vice, and have no plans to. I wasn't having sex -- that wouldn't be until I was twenty-four. And I wasn't taking drugs -- never have, probably never will. And here are some things I was doing: going to church every week and getting nearly straight A's in high school, and I was hanging out with friends who were mostly doing and not doing the same things as I.

But the way my parents talked to me, you would have thought I was Charles fucking Manson. Sometimes I copped some attitude, and sometimes I didn't come home at curfew. What an awful little shit that made me.

Trouble was, I tended to believe what my parents said, if not consciously then certainly subconsciously. Once again, the good I was doing just wasn't nearly good enough. If I'd turned water into wine, my father probably would have complained that I'd failed to walk on it first.

I wasn't perfect, of course. But I don't think I was as bad as all that.

Most of my friends tended to be Mormon, of course, though not all of them had parents as strict as mine. But two of my best friends by the time my year senior rolled around were Catholic. One was John Saylor, a thin translucent-skinned fellow of Basque heritage who was as worldly and cynical and sarcastic and funny as they come. Smart as a whip, too. The other was a fellow I'll call Connor Scott, tall and blond and good-looking and intelligent and popular with the ladies.

I recall arguing religion with both John and Connor, but it never became an issue that threatened our friendships. I think they both left our individual tête-à-têtes convinced that I was willfully blinding myself to some of the more egregiously contradictory aspects of my religion, while I left frustrated that such cool guys were going to be excluded from celestial glory simply because of their refusal to accept Mormon truth. I don't know exactly who it was that I was frustrated with, however -- them or God.

I think now that John and Connor really had the more justified reaction. I was willfully blinding myself. In fact, there were times when one of them would attack a point about which I had entertained actual doubts myself -- and my perverse reaction would be to close up and harden myself against their words. It was that age-old human trait in action, the one that says it's okay for you to criticize the things you're close to, but it's not okay for outsiders to make the same criticisms.

Thus did I become adept at maintaining that dualistic state of mind which all Mormon intellectuals must adopt in order to deal with the world of secular ideals and yet retain their faith in Mormon doctrine. I became adept at lying to myself, and at muffling the inconvenient voice of reason inside when it threatened to topple the shaky tower of my faith.

What I find curious about all this is that I actually stayed friends -- close friends -- with both John and Connor. You see, Mormons aren't supposed to have non-Mormon friends. Wait -- I mean, Mormons are supposed to have non-Mormon friends, because they're supposed to be finding people to share the gospel with, but they're not supposed to really get close to those people, because non-Mormons can be bad spiritual influences on good little Mormon boys and girls . . .

Kind of makes your head swim, doesn't it? Forget the conundrum that faced Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This one's a classic case of commandments so contradictory that even Solomon would go mad trying to embrace them both. Don't associate with non-Mormons, but be sure to spread the gospel to them. God, what misery that caused in the hallowed halls of Davis High!

For some reason, I didn't trouble myself much about my Catholic friends. Maybe it was because they were both so charismatic that I couldn't consider not liking them. But I like to think it was my better self, the wiser one inside, that was responsible for maintaining and nurturing those friendships. Friends of mine in the science fiction field like to talk about the two Orson Scott Cards -- "Wicked Orson" being the staunch and sometimes frightening Mormon polemicist who inhabits the surface of Card's mind, and "Good Scott" being the wise and compassionate and much more knowledgeable fellow lurking way down underneath, whose more correct and truthful worldview often infuses Card's writing with its amazing power. I like to think that there were two me's back in those days, and that the me underneath recognized the value in John and Connor and so refused to let the me on the surface do anything to jeopardize those friendships.

But a lot of people did trouble themselves about the non-Mormon kids. John and Connor, through the benefit of being either flint-skinned or good-looking or both, didn't suffer from torment the way that other kids did. I remember a twin brother and sister whose family were Jehovah's Witnesses. They were virtual pariahs from polite society. When school reconvened in January after the holiday vacation period, it was considered chic for good Mormon kids to ask the twins what they got for Christmas -- the rub being that Jay Dubs don't celebrate Christmas, or birthdays, or any other holidays for that matter.

Utah -- what an awful place to be a Jehovah's Witness.

A kid named Alan Morris got tortured even more cruelly. I don't think I ever knew what his religion was, just that it was something as weird as, if not weirder than, Jaydubbism. (And isn't it a classic case of pot and kettle when a Mormon for god's sake thinks of anyone else's beliefs as weird . . . )

Morris was kind of a geeky kid, yeah, the kind who liked to mix explosives in his basement, but there were Mormon kids of the same stripe who never took the same kind of heat. I confess to my shame that I was one of the ones who tormented him the worst, by virtue of the fact that, as another geek, I shared so many classes with him. If you're reading this, Alan, I want to apologize. The way I badgered you and ridiculed you and tried to make you look stupid was inexcusable. My only salvation, and it's a thin one, is that you turned out to be tough enough to take it -- though I'm sure you bear the scars.

Not so with Alan Rushforth.

The curious thing about Alan Rushforth is that he was Mormon himself, as far as I know. Maybe there was just such a limited supply of non-Mormon prey in our school that, in order to slake our instinctual bloodlust, the rest of us had to turn on our own kind and cull the sickly and wounded from our herd. I don't know. All I know is that we, as a school, treated Alan Rushforth like dirt.

And you know, I can't honestly tell you what he ever did that was so bad. He was a loner, a little strange, and not very good at defending himself either verbally or physically. For all that, he was a big kid, though oversized and soft, with an egg-shaped face that seemed molded into a perpetual expression of shock and wariness. I really can't tell you why anyone picked on him, outside of the fact that he was only a little different from everyone else. Maybe he was just fun to tease.

Whatever. I teased him only once to my recollection. Actually, it was worse than that. I think I called him an idiot during our computer class one day. I really had no reason to think him an idiot, beyond what I had heard in the halls at school. But I called him that anyway.

A week later, he descended to the basement of his parents' house and put a shotgun barrel in his mouth. His mother found him.

Yeah, we were certainly a student body devoted to the pursuit of the ideals of a Christlike society.

The show of righteous sorrow and indignation the following week was nearly the most sickening part of the whole affair. In seminary classes, you would hear the most heartfelt of platitudes spoken, about how we should have reached out to Alan, been nice to him, included him in our activities. We heard what a tragedy it was. We mourned as a school.

No one ever stood up and said, "It was my fault, at least partially, and I'm sorry."

Well, it was my fault, at least partially, and I'm sorry -- for whatever good that does.

But large institutions have a way of recovering and moving on, no matter what the tragedy, and our school was no different. I was one of the two editors of our high school newspaper that year, and my fellow editor Emily Bean and I were putting our rebelliousness into practice by writing controversial editorials that criticized the school's administration far more than they praised. (Hmm. A type of things to come?) I acquired my first girlfriend, a sort of a horse-faced girl whom I'll call Beth, who gave me my first kiss in the front seat of my father's little yellow Toyota Corolla. (Beth, who precipitated the end of one of my longest friendships, was also a girlfriend to about ninety percent of one of my circles of friends during the course of that year.) And, oh yes -- I started listening to rock music that year in a big way.

All right, maybe it wasn't such a big way, but it was certainly significant, at least to me. Perhaps you recall back in Chapter Five, when I credited jazz music with helping to actualize my eventual apostasy. I still believe that, and I'd like to take a moment to examine the mechanism through which I believe it occurred.

First off, I think the Mormon Church is correct to fear music. (And fear music it does, as I'll get to momentarily.) Music has a great capacity to influence the emotions of human beings, and where the emotions go, the thoughts often follow. Growing up, there were certain types of music to which I was exposed, almost to the exclusion of everything else. These were church hymns, country and western, and show tunes. My piano lessons, which commenced when I was nine, introduced me to classical music in a big way, and later to some of the stricter forms of jazz piano, such as ragtime and stride.

But when I first encountered bebop and cool jazz and fusion, I was forced -- unconsciously, for the most part -- to rethink my conception of music. What first struck me as chaotic and impenetrable eventually began to reveal its own structure and logic after repeated listenings. Perhaps the fact that I didn't simply dismiss that weird jazzy stuff when I first discovered it betrays some sort of innate fascination with it, but I firmly believe that my exposure to jazz changed my thinking in more ways than just musically. I believe it helped me become more open-minded.

It certainly helped bring me to the point where I could defend my listening choices, at least in my own head, to my father. He wasn't thrilled by that weird jazz, as I've said before, but he couldn't make any valid objection to it. So later, when I took the plunge into the world of rock music, I had already laid the critical groundwork for the skills that would enable me to separate the good from the bad or the bland, and to defend my choices if necessary. And it was very necessary -- perhaps to myself more than anyone else.

In Chapter Six I recounted how Cliff Morrison introduced me to "new wave" music. My high school friend Darin Goff, who now practices law and fishes for salmon in Alaska, continued this indoctrination, exposing me to such radical new concepts as "reggae" and "ska." And somewhere along the way I developed such an affinity for this kind of stuff that I was ready to purchase my first rock album.

Can you imagine the sensation of utter abandon and depravity that hovered over me as I piloted that little yellow Toyota down to the Layton Hills Mall, intent on a course of action that I feared somewhere down inside would only seal my eventual consignment to hell? Can you imagine how thrilling and dangerous it felt to walk into a record store, pick out an album the creation of which was surely Satanically influenced, and then go to the counter hand over money for which I had exchanged the sacred sweat of my brow? Can you imagine the stealth and trembling with which I sneaked my new prize into my basement room and put it on, as quietly as possibly, oh so blasphemously quietly?

You would have thought I was shooting up or something.

That first album I bought was the Police masterwork Synchronicity. But even as much as I reveled in it on my first listening, there were bits that distressed me. On the surface, songs like "O My God" and "Murder by Numbers" seemed purely evil to me, the first an accusatory rant against God and the second an open advocacy of homicide. My attraction to the music itself, however, forced me to undertake a more serious examination of the lyrics, whereas a more typical kneejerk Mormon reaction would have been to decry the songs at the merest suggestion of impropriety. On closer inspection, "O My God" struck me as an impassioned plea for God to explain his workings, and "Murder by Numbers" revealed itself to be a bitterly cynical indictment of politicians. Neither song was evil, much as pundits like Boyd K. Packer (Mormon apostle and fearmonger par excellence) would have like to convince me otherwise.

(My second rock purchase that year was Joe Jackson's Night and Day, which turned out to be equally as challenging, what with its explorations of the true meaning of manhood and its nontraditional consideration of the homosexual lifestyle.)

Not that my enjoyment of these albums was completely guilt-free. I built up my justifications for listening as a bulwark against all the societally and parentally induced guilt that was trying to sweep over me and carry me away. I had been told in no uncertain terms over the pulpit that rock music existing solely to tempt young men and women into sexual sin, what with its enticingly heavy rhythmic pulse.

Just the previous year, when I was a junior, I had been indoctrinated against rock in my seminary class at school. Our teacher, a very young, earnest and fresh-scrubbed fellow by the name of Brother Jared Wegkamp, had led into his lesson with the confession that he loved rock-and-roll music and that nothing pained him more than the idea that he had to give it up in order to achieve spiritual security. Then he proceeded to play us all sorts of morally reprehensible rock tunes in support of his thesis. (Are you reminded of politicians like Jesse Helms who feel compelled to share instances of pornography with the rest of the world to demonstrate just how awful they really are?) We heard tunes that day like "Hells Bells" by AC/DC, "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin, and even "Only the Good Die Young" by Billy Joel. (Hell, I didn't even figure out what that song was about until a few years later.) The most absurd part of the lesson was when Brother Wegkamp speculated about what the real meaning behind Don McLean's "American Pie" might be, and someone in class volunteered that "levee" pronounced backwards was "evil."

Drove my Chevy to the evil, but the evil was dry. Please.

Brother Rick Tew was my seminary teacher during my senior year. Tew was a jovial, sometimes silly fellow who had an awfully good rapport with teenagers. His class was much more entertaining than any seminary class I'd had before, but no less bizarre for all that. But at least it was a place where harmless absurdity was tolerated. I recall one day when the lesson was about proper dating habits. Brother Tew had just completed an analysis of the dangers of wanton hand-holding between young men and young women. I sat at the back of the room next to my friend Heidi Heath, and after a whispered conference she and I extended our adjacent feet into the aisle so that they were touching. When Brother Tew noticed, he said, without missing a beat, "Of course, there's nothing at all wrong with holding feet, as Bill and Heidi are so helpfully demonstrating."

Brother Tew was a big fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and as the school year drew toward its close he promised that we as a class would make a joint outing to see the soon-to-be-released sequel thereto, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. For me and a few of my friends, however, we couldn't wait for the group outing. The day Temple of Doom opened, we cut class to drive up to the Wilshire Theater in Ogden and buy tickets for that evening's showing. The class I missed was seminary.

Apparently someone snitched on me, because when I went to pick up my seminary report card the next week, there was a note included with mine, in Brother Tew's handwriting, which read: "Who is more important: Indy or Jesus?"

It was one of the few times I had ever been absent from seminary. I guess for me the answer was a resounding "Indy!"

That school year was an important one for me in one last way. The year before, I had finally gotten very serious about my writing, and I had submitted my first couple of stories to magazines for consideration. One story, "Forfeit," was a deal-with-the-devil tale which relied heavily upon Mormon theology for its resolution, in which the protagonist defeats Satan and rescues his own soul through a rigorous application of logic.

A family friend named Lee Christiansen had read this story of mine, and later he forwarded me a photocopy of an ad he had run across in Dialogue. It seemed that a fellow named Benjamin Urrutia was editing an anthology of "Latter-Day Science Fiction," and he sought stories from all walks of Mormondom. Eagerly I mailed him "Forfeit."

Urrutia rejected the story, citing the fact that deal-with-the-devil stories were not part of Mormon folklore, but he said he liked the writing and he encouraged me to send him something more orthodox.

So it was that one morning in the shower at the age of sixteen, I conceived a story about a Mormon astronaut on a space-shuttle mission. Over the next week or so I worked on "Cut Without Hands" and mailed it off to Mr. Urrutia, full of hope.

Miracle of miracles, I heard back from him after a couple of weeks. " 'Cut Without Hands' enthusiastically accepted!" he wrote.

I was about to become a genuinely published writer. Nothing else could have made my senior year of high school more complete.

In celebration, I sat down to write the first draft of my next epic saga -- but this time out my subconscious misgivings about Mormonism were apparently trying to percolate to the surface. Because my next story, "Deus ex Machina," was all about a sentient computer . . . who kills God.

And boy, did writing that story ever alter the course of my life!

Of course, things would have been much worse for me had lovely Lia actually reciprocated my feelings. But dammit, I had no such luck.

Perhaps we should pause here for a moment or two. I don't think I've really managed yet to communicate the width, depth, and breadth of my yearning for -- and mind-numbing terror of -- female contact. I ached for girls with a desperate passion even at the age of four -- long before I had any clue of what could actually be done with them. I wish I knew why this was -- maybe then I'd have some hope of learning where to find the "off" switch for my libido -- but I don't have the first glimmering of a notion. I just know that one of my earliest memories is of trooping around through the vast, tree-studded backyard of my home in Los Angeles with six or seven of my "imaginary girlfriends" trailing along behind me in single-file. These included not only mental projections of a few of the older girls at church, but also such entirely fictional cartoon constructs as Daphne (of Scooby-Doo), Josie (of Josie and the Pussycats) and Tiger Lily (of Walt Disney's Peter Pan).

Matters weren't helped as I grew older by the fact that my two cousins Steve and Denny were such inveterate ladykillers. When our families got together, the two of them would regale me with tales of all the girls they had recently smooched behind the schoolhouse or in lively games of kissing tag -- and this was the third grade! As the years rolled by (brief "relationship" with Julie Taylor in second grade aside), I began to despair of ever catching a girl's eye, much less of getting bussed on the lips. That the girls in elementary school liked to push me down only made the prospects seem worse.

I had what were probably the usual assortment of unrequited crushes in junior high and high school -- including one embarrassing episode in which I attempted to bluff the object of my affections into paying me notice by sending her a letter to the effect that her love was the one thing that could save me from putting a bullet into my brain that night -- but none of them amounted to more than a sweaty solo hand exercise late at night under the sheets. (And bountiful fountains of gelatinous guilt, of course.) The mere presence of an attractive girl would leave me so damn stupid and tongue-tied that any statement above the level of a diffident grunt was a fucking miracle.

To call me socially stunted at the close of my junior year of high school would have been like calling Hitler a somewhat disagreeable fellow. I was the youngest kid in my grade, I was a crashing nerd who worshipped jazz and was so out of the pop-music scene that he couldn't tell Toto from Kansas, and at a time when most all my friends had been driving and dating for quite a good long stretch, I had not yet reached the age where I could legally or morally engage in either--per Utah state law for the former and firm decrees from Mormon prophets for the latter. (If only I had known that one of the most popular members of the drill team had a secret jones for me back in those days. Ah, but that's a tale for Memos from the Moon . . . )

It was in this condition -- in the summer of 1983, at the tender young age of fifteen years, eleven months and three and a half weeks -- that I embarked on my two-week stint at the B.Y.U. summer computer science workshop. And it was in this condition that I got whacked upside the head by the two-by-four of True Love.

The workshop was designed to give high-school computer whizzes from around the state a jump on those pesky freshman-year C.S. classes by immersing them in two weeks of intensive Pascal training. Oh, and incidentally to introduce them to wonders and delights of the Brigham Young campus, and perhaps to tip the scales in favor of the eventual pursuit of a clean, fresh, Church-sanctioned college education a year or so down the road -- and the eventual extraction of crisp, green tuition dollars from their parents' savings accounts at Zions First National Bank.

(The indoctrination didn't stick, by the way. A year later, I would defect to the University of Utah -- much to the dismay of virtually everyone I knew.)

We fresh young geniuses were housed in a clutch of spartan dormitories called Helaman Halls -- named for a mighty hero from the Book of Mormon who led two thousand "stripling warriors" (Mormonese for "buff boys with swords") into battle without getting a single one killed. We attended class in a huge auditorium in the morning and afternoon, worked on our assignments in the computer lab when we could, took our meals in the Helaman cafeteria, and attended carefully chaperoned social events like dances and firesides two or three nights out of the week so that we wouldn't have much leisure time for getting into non-sanctioned mischief.

B.Y.U., in case you didn't know, excels at these sorts of social events. They are its raison d'être. B.Y.U. exists today, insofar as I can tell, mostly to match eligible young Mormon men with eligible young Mormon women and yoke them together for life. There's even a cheesy little Vegas-style wedding chapel -- oh, wait, sorry, that's a holy temple -- right across from the campus on the other side of 9th East, and acres of married-student housing right next to that. There's a joke which claims the "Mrs." is the most sought-after degree conferred by B.Y.U.

Whatever. Obviously, no one was trying to rush a bunch of high-school kids into marriage. (The boys would have to serve missions before becoming eligible, and although the girls were already marriageable under state law, it really wasn't cool to get them hitched until after graduation.) But B.Y.U. does what it does, so most of our official social activities were engineered to push boys and girls together in carefully controlled circumstances.

Of course, I skipped out on as many of these as I could.

It wasn't that I didn't want to meet girls. It was just that I could never do it successfully, even under laboratory conditions, and those failures were so mortifying that I could never bear to deal with them in public.

I did fine for friends, though. My roommate was a tall, thin, friendly fellow named Clifford Morrison who attended Olympus High in Salt Lake City, and several of his friends -- a mixed bag of boy and girl geniuses -- were also attending the workshop. I stuck with Cliff and by default found myself part of a nice, fun, comfortable social group.

We only shared a room for two weeks, but Cliff ended up having a dramatic influence on me in two separate arenas -- one that was immediately apparent, and one that I shrugged off at the time but which reverberated for many years afterward.
      First, Cliff was into this weird kind of pop music called "new wave." I'm not a rock historian -- I don't know precisely when new wave began to emerge as an identifiable music genre (1977 or so?), but I do know that the less commercial facets of it (everything not the Police or Elvis Costello) didn't reach Utah until not long before Cliff Morrison introduced them to me. Earlier that summer he had discovered a new (and rather weak) FM station that was playing this cool and unusual stuff, and that's what the radio in our room delivered almost constantly for the next two weeks.

Can I do justice to the perilous thrill I still feel when I hear names like the English Beat, Yaz, Echo & the Bunnymen, Madness, the Smiths, Modern English, Split Enz, Depeche Mode, Haircut 100, the Cure, Romeo Void, Vicious Pink, and Roman Holiday? I doubt it. Nevertheless, this is the sort of exciting and illicit music, innocuous as it may seem today, that would pry my head open over the course of the next year and leave me open to the ravages of the wider world of rock. For that I have Cliff Morrison and his cheap little radio to thank.

Cliff's second profound effect on me stemmed from his religious philosophy. I was shocked enough to discover that my roommate was a firm and confirmed atheist; that he was also a genuinely nice guy was something that required a reordering of the neural pathways in my brain to properly apprehend. I'd had non-Mormon friends before -- in fact, a couple of my best friends from high school, as I'll get to in Chapter Seven, were Catholic -- but this was something else altogether. With friends of other religions, at least we had the common ground of belief in a god. With Cliff, all the common ground we shared was our love of computers, our teenaged boyhood, and our humanity.

Hey, come to think of it, that's plenty.

I didn't go home from that summer workshop any more convinced of the correctness of atheism than I had been when I arrived. But I did go home with a practical understanding of the fact that atheists could be good people too. And I find a delightful irony in the fact that I learned this at B.Y.U.

Strangely enough, I might not have reflected so often on my time with Cliff were it not for something my father said to me the week of my return home. When I reported that my roommate had been an atheist, my father responded vehemently with a statement to this effect: "No, son, it is flatly impossible for someone only sixteen years old to be an atheist!"

My father said this with such certainty and authority that I had no choice but to accept it, at least on a surface level. But somewhere deeper, I don't think I really bought it. How else to explain the fact that I kept returning to that assertion for years and years afterward, turning it over in my mind, examining it from every side, worrying it like a rosary bead?

It's only been within the past couple of years that I could put into words the obvious flaw in that notion -- a flaw which should have been obvious from the get-go. L.D.S. doctrine teaches that a child reaches the age of accountability at eight. This is the age at which Mormon children are expected to know enough about the Restored Gospel that they can make the choice -- of their own free will, no less! -- to accept the solemn lifelong and binding covenant of baptism. This is serious business -- so serious, in fact, that Mormons count it an abomination to baptize children any younger than eight, when there's a sentient being inside that little skull sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to understand what covenant it's undertaking and why. (Thus one of the fundamental tensions between Mormons and those idolatrous heathen Catholics.)

So -- to restate my father's belief in view of what we've just learned -- an eight-year-old child is sufficiently learned and mature to decide first that there is in fact a god, second that Mormonism provides the one correct system for approaching that god in worship, and third that he or she is prepared to swear eternal allegiance to that god through an act of ritual cleansing . . . while a sixteen-year-old nearing adulthood is completely incapable of reasoning out the nonexistence of God to his or her own satisfaction.

There's this bridge down the street from me I'd like to sell you. Answers to the name of Brooklyn.

Okay, that's enough on Cliff. My point is made, and what you're all really interested in is sex. I mean romance.

I mentioned earlier that Cliff was part of a small group of young smarties from Olympus High at the workshop. There were three girls in this group, none of whom I found particularly attractive, but one of them was friends with this gorgeous and fiery Portuguese girl named Lia. And oh my good golly gracious!

Lia attended Alta High in Sandy. She and her family had only lived in the States for about a year, as I recall. She was born in Portugal, then moved to Brazil when she was about ten, where the family had lived for the five years prior to moving to Utah. (Exotic progression, no?) Her father worked in computers, and Lia had inherited every gram his brilliance.

I knew none of this at first, of course. All I knew was that the café-au-lait-skinned beauty with the black hair and the intoxicating Latin accent who sometimes hung out with Cliff's little group was way out of my league. Hell, forget leagues. I wasn't even playing the same game.

But by the middle of the first week, something miraculous had happened. Lia had started paying attention to me -- addressing comments directly to me instead of to the group, listening raptly while I played the piano in the lobby of the men's dormitory, smiling at me at odd moments. I floated in a cloud of rapture, despite the fact that a good seventy-five percent of me refused to believe that what I saw happening was actually happening. "You must be misinterpreting things," that majority voice would say. "You know she can't possibly be interested in a skinny geek like you."

Late in the week, Cliff and I returned to our room after some group get-together, and he said, "You know, Bill, I'm really getting the idea that Lia likes you."

This outside confirmation of the thing I hoped for so devoutly pleased me to no end, but I tried not to let it show. What I did was pump him for an explanation, to silence that noisy pessimistic clamor in my head. The clues he enumerated matched mine.

Then Friday evening arrived. A special dance had been arranged for the workshop attendees in the Smith Fieldhouse, but I didn't go. I was still so painfully shy that I didn't dare show my face at the dance. Instead, as night fell, I wandered around the campus in a morass of depression, convinced against all evidence that Lia really had no interest in me and that if I went to the Fieldhouse and asked her to dance I'd only wind up soundly rejected and publicly humiliated.

That was when Lia appeared from out of the darkness. I had just ascended the long sloping asphalt walkway that joined the Helaman Halls complex to the upper portion of the campus, and I was headed for the Wilkinson Center to play some video games, shoot some pool, or maybe bowl a line or two . . .

(A brief amusing story about that walkway, if you will permit me a brief digression. It being the height of summer, many of the girls in our extended workshop crew were wont to wander around barefoot -- quite contrary to B.Y.U. dress standards. It again being the height of summer, when the sprinklers adjacent to that walkway turned themselves on, droves of snails were wont to emerge from the surrounding foliage and strew themselves at random across the cool, wet asphalt. One evening after dark, a large group of us were ascending that walkway, on our way to some gathering or another somewhere. The sprinklers had been on, no one could see where they were stepping . . . I won't attempt to describe the multitude of sickening crunches I heard that evening from under the feet of those fortunate enough to be wearing shoes. What are even more memorable to me, however, are the horrified shrieks of the girls who went unshod. I guess aversion therapy is one way to enforce a dress code.)

. . . so as I was saying, I ran into Lia just as I was on my way to the Wilkinson Center. She was heading the other way, but my heart leapt as I assessed the possibilities of getting her to come with me to play some games. But when she asked me why I wasn't at the dance, I could only stammer through some lame explanation of why I wasn't interested. She spent a moment trying to convince me that I should go -- despite that fact that she wasn't going herself -- then left me and disappeared back into the darkness.

I don't know which depressed me more, the fact that I couldn't have danced with her even had I gone to the dance, or the immediate demonstration that she wasn't interested in spending time with me anyway. But it didn't really matter, I guess. I trudged on along on my lonely, solitary way.

But no more than a couple of minutes passed before Lia came rocketing out of the darkness from behind me, seized me by the upper arm, and dragged me along in her wake. "Come on," she said. "You're not going to mope around all by yourself tonight. Let's go eat something."

I was thrilled, I was chilled, I was . . . well, I was lost in swirl of delightful and frightening sensations. The sudden giddy sweetness of the whole affair, however, was overshadowed by worry and guilt over the fact you might say I was having my first date -- and that would have been a sin, since I was still two whole days shy of my sixteenth birthday.

But that didn't stop me from going with the flow. We ordered a couple of burgers at the Cougareat, found ourselves a nice corner booth, and talked into the wee hours. (Well, okay, we talked until curfew which was something like ten-thirty or eleven.) But this was the first time in my life I had sat down and really talked with a girl for any length of time -- excluding my sister Seletha, who doesn't really count -- and let me tell you, it was amazing and revelatory. And I walked away from that evening as thoroughly and completely head over heels in love as I've ever been.

I was too busy being in love even to begin to worry about the fact that we shared neither a race nor a religion.

That was the end of week one. Lia left early the next morning to go home for the weekend, and the next day and half were the longest thirty-six hours of my life. I called my parents in the middle of Sunday afternoon just to check in, and my father jokingly asked me if I'd found a girlfriend yet, it being my sixteenth birthday and all. When I hesitated, he said, "Uh-oh. Come on, out with it. What's her name?"

With reluctance but also a certain pride, I said, "Lia. She's from Portugal. But she's not really my girlfriend. We're just friends, is all."

I kept further details to myself.

As I said, those weekend hours were the longest of my life. But late Sunday evening, I was sitting with Cliff and the gang in the lobby of the men's dorm when someone sneaked up from behind me and dropped a big red envelope in my lap. I turned, and of course it was Lia, looking as dark and alluring and dangerous and intoxicating and mysterious as a pint of Guinness. (Okay, okay, that's probably a bad simile -- certainly one that would never have occurred to me at the time -- but you get the idea. Unless you've always been a straight-arrow Mormon, that is.) "Open it, open it," she said. Inside was a birthday card and a note, but the only salient detail I recall was the closure: "Love, Lia."

There is a branch of mathematics which deals with infinite numbers, and it assures us that you can indeed double infinity -- a certain class of infinity, anyway. But I could have told you that without consulting a book, because I felt infinity double in my heart right there on the spot. That may have been the happiest moment thus far in my short life.

But it was short-lived. Over the subsequent week I tried to see more and more of Lia (in the sense of hanging out with her, so get your minds out of the gutter!), but I succeeded less and less frequently. We started out working together on our assignments in the computer lab, but that had trailed off by mid-week. By the time our mini-graduation ceremony rolled around on Saturday, I hardly saw Lia at all except in class.

What the hell had happened? What had I done? I lay awake at night agonizing over these questions, but no answers came.

My parents drove down from Kaysville for the graduation -- and of course to pick me up and bring me back home. I wore my best suit to the ceremony, and when Lia turned up she was wearing a lacy and almost scandalous white dress that ended just shy of her kneecaps. Looking at her, I couldn't breathe. She was a vision, a bright Catholic angel made flesh in the dark heart of a Mormon stronghold.

I didn't get anywhere near Lia at the graduation ceremony, but there was a short dance scheduled for afterward. I went to the dance while my parents hung out elsewhere -- reminiscing about their own days at the Y, no doubt -- and an hour or so into the shindig I managed to get next to Lia just at the start of a slow song. It took everything I could muster, but I managed to ask her to dance. She began to decline, but I said, "Please?"

She sighed, nodded, took my hand, and led me onto the crowded dance floor. I put my awkward arms around her, and she lay her head against my shoulder, and we rocked in a slow circle for a minute or two to the strains of a song I had always despised -- Journey's "Open Arms" -- but came in the space of a hundred seconds to adore.

But in the middle of the song, she pushed away from me, not meeting my eyes, and murmured, "I'm sorry."

Then she turned and rushed out of the room.

I didn't follow. I couldn't. I was frozen, rooted to the spot. I didn't know what to do, or what to feel.

And that was the end of that. The dance eventually ended, and my parents drove me home. "Was that Lia I saw in the white dress at your graduation?" my mother asked from the front seat. "She was very pretty."

My father said nothing.

That wasn't the last I ever saw of Lia -- it's a small state, after all -- but it was the last contact between us of any real significance. In some ways it's probably good that things ended there. I doubt I was ready to wrangle with my father over a girlfriend both non-Mormon and non-Caucasian. (My good friend Darin used to say, whenever I was dating a girl of whom my father disapproved, that all I needed to do to put things in perspective for Dear Ol' Dad was to find a nice black girl who would come home with me and pose as my girlfriend for an evening. The only thing wrong with that plan was the abuse to which it would have subjected the girl.) In other ways I'm not so sure. Maybe that sort of a relationship could have hastened my progress down the road to apostasy and spared me some of the more significant pain and heartache to come. I don't know.

I do know that a pattern was established in those two short weeks at B.Y.U. From then on, my nearest, dearest and fiercest female friends -- the women I loved without ever becoming romantically involved -- were almost exclusively non-Mormon, and the one or two who were nominally Mormon were also at severe odds with L.D.S. practice and belief.

(This is not to mention the fact that for months after that summer computer workshop I couldn't look at a white girl without thinking her a pallid substitute for a real woman -- i.e., Lia.)

It also started me on some serious thinking. What in the world would I do if I ever fell in love with a non-Mormon girl -- and she actually reciprocated? It's by no mere whimsy that Mormon youth are strongly discouraged from dating outside the Church. As was drilled into our heads for as far back as I can remember, you marry whom you date. So if it ever came down to that dread choice between love and religion, which way would I fall?

We've got a lot of ground to cover in this section, so keep up and stick close.

It was the middle of January 1978 when we moved the ten or so miles up Interstate 15 from Bountiful to Kaysville. We had a bigger house now, which was nice -- all but for the fact that my bedroom was in the unfinished basement, and I heard a knocking come from the empty room on the other side of the wall one afternoon. Everything was hunky-dory but for that.

Oh, and school. Can't forget school. That wasn't so swell at first, either. In Kaysville, you see, elementary school included only kindergarten through fifth grade, while the sixth through eighth grades attended the junior high. Which meant that I was leaving elementary school in the middle of the year and moving straight into junior high. Do not pass "Go," do not collect $200.

Junior high included all the typical nastiness you might expect for a nerdy bespectacled kid whose father made him carry a briefcase to school instead of a backpack. (This was only after some jerk dumped my huge armload of books in the hall one day, and a fat old gym teacher named Mr. Sedgwick commented on how clumsy I was.) There were the bullies, of course, and there was the locker room, and there were the girls who teased me because of my clothes, and there was Social Studies, which was the first class I ever got a C- in, and on and on. You've been there. You know the drill.

And there was the strange experience of learning to stifle my conscience and obey the social order.

You see, on my very first day at Kaysville Junior, I met Dean Jones. No, not the Disney actor who more recently appeared in Beethoven and Clear and Present Danger, but this chinless, slightly chubby farm boy in faded blue jeans and equally faded red hair. I forget how it happened; we must have sat near each other in the class just before lunch, because I ended up eating with him in the cafeteria that day. And as we sat and ate and talked (about not much of anything, as far as I recall), Dean kept looking up from his tray at me with this big goofy grin of pure pleasure on his face.

It was only after lunch that I figured it out. When some bullies started picking on him. When other kids pointed out to me that the dark stain on the back of Dean's pants meant that he regularly dropped loads in his shorts.

Dean was looking at me with such amazement and pleasure because, for those few minutes at least, he had a friend, someone with whom he was a clean slate, someone who wasn't teasing him or tormenting him but who was sitting down and eating a meal with him and treating him like a human being.

That night, when my father came into my room to ask me how my first day at school had been, I tried to tell him about Dean Jones and how much my heart broke for him. I cried, in fact, and while my father did his best to comfort me, I'm not sure he ever figured out what the matter was.

No matter. That tender heart of mine would be well on its way to hardened within the year.

Because I did meet other people. I did make other friends. And I learned that being friends with outcasts could lead to becoming an outcast oneself.

It was less than a year later, when I was in seventh grade, that I participated in a particularly cruel round of Dean Baiting, a game in which someone would take one of Dean's books or other possessions, then toss it to someone else while Dean chased after it doggedly but without success. At one point in this game, I got down on my hands and knees behind Dean while one of my cohorts gave him a push from the front. He fell, of course, and whacked himself a good one on the asphalt.

Yeah, I had found my place in society.

Not that I didn't have qualms, or twinges of conscience. I knew I wasn't being a good kid. Even as I continued to learn and progress at church, even as I was being praised by my Sunday school teachers and Boy Scout leaders, I was becoming a Bad Kid. Not in the usual ways, true. I didn't drink alcohol or do drugs, and I didn't watch R-rated movies, and I didn't listen to that evil rock-'n'-roll music. But I did pick up some cusswords, and I did participate in the ritual torment of less fortunate kids (as per the Dean Baiting games). I knew that, every day, I was turning my soul a shade closer to black.

Now, you may contend that the things I did really weren't that bad. And I'll respond, "Yes and no." No, because I really wasn't such a bad kid. (What are cusswords, anyway, but sounds some people don't want to hear?) Yes, because I willfully contributed to the destruction of at least one young man who didn't fit in with the crowd. And I'm not talking about Dean Jones, despite the fact that he went on to become a major stoner in high school. I'm talking about Alan Rushforth, although we won't get to the end of that story until Chapter Seven or so.

Now, I may be giving you the idea that I was a popular kid in junior high, but that would be a mistaken impression. I was a geek, no two ways about it. But I wasn't an outcast. I did have friends -- mostly other geeks, but some that actually ran with the fashionable crowds. That's what happens when you're smart and let other kids copy from your tests.

But we were talking about my soul's steady progress from white toward black.

Not a Sunday went by that I didn't resolve to try to be a better person. No more swearing, no more thinking about naked girls, no more failure to study my scriptures like I ought to, no more filching quarters from my brothers' and sisters' piggy banks. Every time I did a bad thing, or failed to do a good thing, I knew that I was one step closer to eternal damnation, and I knew I had one more thing to repent for. But that repentance -- that was a tricky thing. I was taught in Church that, in order to truly repent and be forgiven by God, I had to follow certain steps.

First, I had to recognize that what I had done was wrong. (Hey, that was the all-too-easy part.)

Second, I had to confess the wrong thing to the proper person. This might be the person I had sinned against, or it might be my parents or my bishop, depending on the seriousness of the sin. (This was manifestly more difficult, as I have this lifelong fear of confrontation.)

Third, I had to make restitution for the sin, if appropriate. (This meant restoring the stolen item to its proper owner, or restoring the loss of dignity to its former owner, or whatever. A hell of a lot easier said than done.)

Fourth, I had to ask God for forgiveness. (Okay, pretty easy.)

Fifth, I had to never commit that same sin again, or else my old forgivenesses would be erased and God would re-remember the bad stuff I'd already repented of. (What?!)

Even at the ripe old age of twelve, I recognized that the repentance process was like digging a hole in sand -- the faster you dig, the faster the hole fills back in. In other words, I knew that I could never repent for all my sins. And it was only after this lifelong process of digging a hole in the sand that Christ's atonement would kick in -- only after I'd done all I could on my own.

Uh-uh. No way was I ever going to make it to heaven. It was the Telestial Kingdom for me for sure, after a nice season roasting in Hell. I would be the bad seed who kept our family from dwelling together eternally with God in the Celestial Kingdom. I'd be responsible for tearing our eternal family apart.

Of course, I wasn't yet able to realize that this indicated more of a problem with the things I was being taught than it did a problem with me. I was far from perfect, but I don't think I was on the road to Hell. The road to apostasy, maybe, but not to Hell.

Anyway, this was a hell of a neurosis for a studious pre-teen like me to be dealing with. When combined with all the normal difficult shit that a kid of that age goes through, it turned me (at home, anyway) into a taciturn recluse who spent most of his free time reading books and drawing comics and writing stories and not wanting anyone else in the house to look at the things I was doing.

It was around this age, of course, that my father committed what felt at the time like the ultimate betrayal of our relationship.

You may recall from Chapter One that my father used to take me to the planetarium a lot when I was small. If I had to point to one thing and say, "This is what turned me into a fan of science fiction," then those planetarium trips with my father would be the thing. Well, when I discovered all the great SF novels there in the school library -- Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Andre Norton -- I couldn't keep my hands off them. I was always reading something far-out and mind-bending and weird and wonderful.

One Sunday morning as I was getting ready for church, my father burst into my room waving one of my library books. It was something by Andre Norton -- either Android at Arms or Breed to Come, I don't remember which -- and I had carelessly left it sitting on the stereo in the living room. Oops.

You see, the subject matter of the novel was genetic engineering, tinkering with DNA, cloning. My father had picked up the book, read the flyleaf, and flipped out. (And not in the good way that I would flip out when I read something like that.) When he burst into my room, he was ranting about the evils of playing God and how cloning was a sick sin and all kinds of twisted crap like that. Before he left again, I'd been soundly rebuked, spanked, and forbidden ever to read science fiction again.

This from the man who used to take me to the planetarium and discuss the eventual heat death of the universe with me. That was the beginning of the end for us.

Needless to say, I didn't stop reading science fiction. I didn't even stop reading that particular Andre Norton novel, despite the fact that I'd been ordered to return it to the library. When my father caught me reading it in my room a week later, it was one of the more memorable beatings of my life.

I must concede that he eventually became resigned to the fact that I was going to read science fiction no matter what. In fact, when I got really serious about writing science fiction in high school, he went out and found me a copy of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine so I could try selling my stories. It was too little too late, though. The damage was already done.

Science fiction wasn't the only thing that was off-limits in our home. Another was rock music. Of course, this didn't bother me much growing up. I was perfectly happy to listen to my father's Forty No. 1 Gold Country Hits record, or to the soundtracks from Disney movies, and when I started learning the piano then classical music was all I ever wanted to listen to on the radio.

(It was in junior high, in fact, that I first learned how "uncool" classical music was. For some class, a kid I knew was taking a survey of what radio stations the students listened to most, and what their favorite music groups were. My answers were KBYU and the Utah Symphony -- and it was all around the school in a matter of hours.)
      As time wore on, though, the music that attracted me more and more was jazz. I started out with the soft stuff -- Chuck Mangione, which I first encountered as a member of the high school marching band. The first record album I ever owned was Mangione's Feels So Good, for which I still feel a great fondness, even though I recognize that it's more pop than jazz. But then I moved on to the harder stuff -- these unusual, exciting sounds that blew on KUER at night, after the classical-music deejays went home to bed. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea -- these were the guys who taught me what jazz was about.

Okay, that's probably enough of that, because we're here to talk about my apostasy, and not my musical education -- though to some extent the two of them are linked.

Anyway, my father tolerated my forays into this jazz stuff, I think, only because he couldn't come up with any gospel-related objection to it. And if he ever did take me to task for listening to so much of it, I would point out that at least I wasn't listening to rock.

That always sent him off muttering.

Anyway, this -- early in high school -- was around the time that I started making my first pointed observations about the L.D.S. Church -- early criticisms, if you will. Perhaps most seminally, I began to realize that there was a lot of poverty (or near to it) in my ward. I wasn't quite to the point yet where I realized that the Church put a real premium on personal wealth (and why shouldn't it, when it skims ten percent right off the top?), but I did realize that teaching that men and women should marry young and start their families right away was leading to some mighty miserable living right there in my own neighborhood. I would bike down those quiet suburban streets, observing the dumpy and sad-looking women, almost inevitably pregnant, not yet thirty years old but their faces already imprinted with extreme weariness, as they shuffled out into their unkempt yards and tried to shepherd their four or five dirty kids out of the yard and back into the house.

Scenes like that frightened me. And made me mad. And they made me resolve to myself that I would not get married until I was financially stable, and old enough to know what I was doing, no matter how much social pressure the Church tried to exert on me. I was not going to marry a woman only to do that to her.

(Of course, I never really pictured myself ever getting married back then. Girls terrified me. In fact, I was dreading my sixteenth birthday something awful, because that was when my friends and family would expect me to start dating. Aaaagggghhhh!)

Other aspects of the Church absolutely frightened me. People would get up in fast-and-testimony meeting and talk about all the Signs of the Times, and how the Second Coming was on its way, and how they hoped it would hurry up and get here so that life would be all skittles. "Are you kidding?" I would think to myself, horrified. "When Christ shows up, we're all going to be toast! Especially me!" I had no illusions about my own personal worthiness. Hell, I regularly lied to the bishop during our semiannual interviews. I knew for a fact that I'd never survive the damn Second Coming. I hoped it wouldn't happen until long after I was dead.

To a lesser extent, I was afraid of one day being mistaken for a good man and being called as a bishop. Folks in the ward were always putting ideas like that into my head. "Oh, goodness, you're such a fine and smart young man. You're sure to be a bishop someday, or something even more important!" You know, stuff like that.

Well, I was damn sure that I didn't want to be a bishop. That was more responsibility than I cared for. It was hard enough for me to find time to write my little stories, and I was only a teenaged kid in high school. Imagine what it would be like to be holding down a job and caring for a family, and having to do everything a bishop does on top of that! No thanks. Not for me.

On a much lower level, my church membership made me feel guilty about writing science fiction in the first place. After all, how was I ever to justify making a career out of writing stories that took place hundreds, even thousands, of years in the future, when I knew damn well (or was supposed to know damn well, anyway) that Christ was coming to put an end to things before very much longer?

Of course, my solution for this disparity was to tackle it head on, as I'll explain in more detail after a couple more chapters.

Meanwhile, my days passed as though in a dream, and before you know it I was finishing up my junior year of high school, and I was rapidly approaching my sixteenth birthday. (Child prodigy, remember?) My math teacher, Lenzi Nelson (and few finer teachers have I ever known), recommended me for a special summer computer workshop at B.Y.U., and I jumped at the opportunity to go. My parents were quite happy, I think, to send me off to B.Y.U. for two weeks that summer. Of course, I don't think they were so happy to see me come back.

Because B.Y.U. is where I genuinely fell in love for the very first time in my life.

Her name was Lia. She was Portuguese.

And Catholic.

And dark-skinned.

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.

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 thirty-five years.

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...