I. First of America
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On days like this the sky stiffens, as if to say that summer will never come. Those sweet April showers, each one riding the tail of the one before, migrating through Kalamazoo without a warm week, chase the longest winter since I’ve been here. And now it rains, and rains, shining the cold, black tarmac where the cars have not yet come in. Just beyond the parking lot there is a delicate mist hanging on the grasses and between the pines, bending the sleepy Dutch tulips and daffodils who didn’t know it wasn’t time to wake up yet, and I wonder why I can no longer sleep.
     And so, in the First of America1 parking lot, the sun comes up and I sit in my old broken-down Bronco watching the short, short skies over the black glass and brown brick of Corporate Woods. All that raw land behind rolls in one believable bulge, twenty hours by car, back to the Wasatch Mountains. All that road, all those people still in their dreaming. The morning sun won’t be out there yet. Only hours earlier, it tucked the shores of Great Salt Lake in, pulling the shadow-blanket across the valley as it hesitated before fading off behind the blue mountains of Nevada. I’ve watched that sun go down so many times that even in the gray mist of a sleepless Michigan morning it plays clear in my head. I think of Jaimy Sizemore; I even think of Joseph Smith2 and what I never found there or here and why. I think of Jaimy Sizemore.
     My father’s words come to me now: “If you have faith,” he always says, “your past will save you.” Maybe it’s his voice calling me back. Maybe it is His voice calling me for the first time in my life.
     I don’t want to think it’s the green numbers on the dash clock that pull me out of my nostalgia and into the rain, but the pit-a-pat song on the radio has ended. A song from ten years ago (ten years!) that stretches something inside me back to the dry mountains, fading away as I cross the parking lot, trying to outpace one of the Snack-Machines (Kitty’s term of endearment, but like loads of everything else, something I’ve taken to using in spite of the fact it’s not mine) to the revolving door, and I let her beat me to it. At times I think it’s a meat grinder we all arrive at to meet the same fate: it chews our rolls and lumps and crushes our bones and joints into sausage, then stuffs that undigested flesh into plastic bank tubes. I’ve come to hate my life this much.
     And this is the great mystery. The folding inward, the premature collapse. How have I come to empty myself of promise, of what little altruism I may have had once, a short time ago in Kaysville, two thousand green miles from the reflective black glass of a revolving door? “Lies and promises start off on the same road,” my father always says.
     I nod at the short, ruddy-faced and dandruffed guard who will spend most of the rest of the morning tending his prostate condition in the men’s room, and I turn down a short hallway, on the ground floor, to the CONSUMER LOAN DIVISION. Most of the Snack-Machines are there, shaking down their coats or walking the aisles of carpeted cubicles prospecting for morsels of double-fudge brownies, peanut-butter pie, angel food. They are ‘wonderful-nice,’ the Snack-Machines, masterful calendars and caretakers of the office, spending their extra hours in their kitchens loading and unloading ovens of birthday squares, baby cakes, and retirement pies. I truthfully didn’t have a drop of animosity toward this corpulent society until I found myself fat. A rubbery tube of flesh hangs over the lip of my belt-line and snaps inward like a minor under-tow when I bend down. At least I can still get to my shoes.
     There’s Dee Dee, who smells of lotion and whose thighs rub together so hard when she walks that she now wears spandex pants under her skirts to keep her skin from rawing over, and I hear her huffing up and down the aisles of computers and people dispensing reams of research and loan requests—schweep, schweep, schweep, schweep—“Good morning, gooooood morning”—until she stops at a desk near mine. It’s Kitty’s birthday today. I am to begin sneaking the card and I remove my coat, shake the small round drops stupid enough to cling to my hair, and flop down into my pigeon-hole to think up something cheering. I know that every last one of the Snack-Machines will have brought Kitty some food to share, and that Geoff, L.T. and I will be the only ones without an offering, and so it should be something sincere, something cheering. It reads: Happy Birthday, Kitty! Everything was getting smaller and smaller until you came along. Here’s hoping next year finds you in Arizona, away from this God-awful place.
     I leave off the last part and pass the card back to L.T. Since they’ve changed our desks, (again!) I’m so tucked away I can no longer see the clock, so I turn on my computer and type ‘TIME’ and my computer responds: “‘TIME’ IS NOT RECOGNIZED. 04/24/96 08:07.54.” And I spend the next two minutes and six seconds tapping my RETURN key to watch the clock roll around to 8:10 a.m. From where I sit I can now see the tops of the black glass windows that look out onto the parking lot and I see they are spotted with rain.
     Rhoda and I are living in separate apartments again, ever since I told her my roommate Phil was out of town. And he was, as far as I knew. So she gets out of bed after a session to go clean up in the bathroom and there’s Phil coming out of his room, having mixed his nights and days again by driving down in a snowstorm from Traverse City the previous night, and he and Rhoda come face to face, only she’s nude and he’s not and my seed’s starting to drip out of her. It used to be that I was jealous of another guy seeing what Phil saw, as if one of my secrets had been given up, decoded. But I know Rhoda’s been much more decoded than that by people I like a lot less than Phil.
I drove past her apartment this morning on the way to work, hoping there was something clairvoyant between us. I parked the Bronco in the morning drizzle and tried to think her out of bed. Tried to think whether or not she was alone or with Mr. Mysterious again—the man I know visits her nights her answering machine tells me she’s not home, this Mr. Mysterious shedding his body hair in her sheets, whose very face I’ve had to create in my own mind. She’s a student, Rhoda is, and when she is alone she doesn’t rise until the sun hits her window, which, this time of year, in this part of the time zone, would be late enough anyway, but she’s got these twin pines looming over her apartment. When nothing happens I whistle at her window, but it echoes across the street instead and I’m back in the Bronco on my way to work before my whistle fades from the dark, wet street. Rhoda’s Catholic and I wonder if that’s what makes me think of Jaimy again, if there is something unresolved I’ve squirrelled away which, like the ignorant tulips outside F.O.A., has come out of hibernation to bloom.
     When I met Rhoda last year I told her I was a Mormon, though that’s a lie as much as anything. It seems, outside of Utah, that being Mormon is something I’m compelled to announce as if I’m a lottery winner or suffering a contagious infection. And outside of Utah it’s as much announcement as substance. There’s a ward house near my apartment, but I can’t bear to go any more. It’s like going to a movie by myself. Church has always been, in large part, about the family dynamic, and by myself I no longer hear the call of the Angel Moroni’s golden trumpet; the sound doesn’t carry all the way from Salt Lake Temple3 to my red ears in Kalamazoo. It’s become enough for me, in the Midwest, to announce myself as Mormon and wonder what kind of chills or thrills that word brings to Gentile ears.
     When I was home and the shoe was on the other foot, Jaimy and the few Gentiles I knew would announce their religious affiliations with a cross dangling around their necks. They weren’t being antagonistic, most of them. There was a need for order you came to appreciate, something to help avoid embarrassing questions about what ward you belonged to and who your Bishop4 was.
     Though I’ve always been put off by the wearing of the cross and by the crosses I see stuck onto the steeples of churches like the Dutch Reform Churches of western Michigan, I think it helps things along if everybody knows where everybody is coming from. But I also think that if a friend of mine were shot to death saving my life I wouldn’t hold up the bullet as a sign of his suffering and sacrifice. It seems to me the bullet would be the last thing I’d hang onto. Rhoda tells me that’s simplistic and that it overlooks our role in Christ’s death. Catholic guilt, I say, though I don’t doubt that I’m simplistic.
     Dee Dee comes huffing back around with my print-offs and I start ordering my research, making sure the customers from my bank—having secured and paid off loans for cars, boats, jacuzzis and occasionally a vacation—aren’t getting any money back they haven’t already paid us. I used to let a claim slip every day—just one—some small amount, until I realized that the bank was willing to spend three bucks per customer to get their money back. $1.29. $3.42. $14.02. I calculated that in some obscene First of American way I was driving up the interest on their loans and I quit doing it.
     The refunds are ridiculously low given what they pay me to track them down, justify them, and send them out to the people who sent them in. And the names spin by in the thousands. I remember them all, it seems, and some nights the people in my dreams assume their names, as their identities, and sometimes, as pathetic as it sounds, their loans. One of them is Mr. Mysterious, I tell myself. I once had Bobby Hansen’s name come across my desk. Hansen was an NBA journeyman from the state of Utah who picked up a championship ring with the Bulls after escaping from the floundering Kings in the ’91–’92 season.
     “Brian,” L.T. says right on cue from behind his carpeted wall, his voice cut by the oscillating fan at his desk, “you think your Jazz5 gonna get outta the first round this year?” L.T., an avid basketball fan, comes down on me like a cold rain after a Jazz loss. He knows I’ll bet Jazz no matter who’s on deck and he cut me out of $100 last year when the Jazz faded at home to the Houston Rockets in the first round. It pissed me off, but at least he has Geoff and me over to his house every other Sunday for a genuine Texan bar-b-que. L.T.’s displaced like me, and we watch a game and talk about anything but the bank. We call ourselves the Amigos after the movie The Three Amigos with Chevy Chase and Steve Martin.
     So L.T. made me pay up, and after, as we were finishing another six pack, he was rambling and doing his shtick, that straight-in-the-eye don’t-mess-with-the-black-man humor of his, about how his father cut out on him and how he can’t settle down with just his one girlfriend, Jane, a beautiful woman with a ten year old boy who loves L.T. with a passion, who admires all L.T.’s stories and tall-tales about how he can dunk standing still, and suddenly I snapped: “You live your life out a window, L.T. And you’re going to find yourself stuck at F.O.A. in twenty years, balancing loans.”
     Now L.T. chides me again. “They’re gonna slide right into the fifth seed. They’re tough at home, I’ll grant you that, but fifth seed’s gonna mean Karl’s6 hauling sheep all summer long.”
     “They’ll suck it up. This is their year,” I say. This is one thing I believe in. One place for faith in my life. “They’re due.” L.T. says nothing. The Amigos talk about three things at work: sports, movies, and music. Geoff talks about the car he’s restoring, folding and unfolding a car-buff magazine he’s had for more than two years loaded up on pictures of reconditioned cars and order forms for more parts, but the Amigos don’t talk about Geoff’s car. Geoff talks about Geoff’s car.
     “Did you guys hear that P.L. Travers died last week?” L.T. asks. He’s playing a game the Amigos like to play. I hear the click-click-clack of the keyboards all around us. The carpeted cubicles can’t drown out their ruckus.
     “One hint, L.T.” Geoff says.
     “Think Disney. Think Australia. Think about a strange wind blowing . . .”
     “Jesus,” says Geoff. “Not the Mary Poppins lady!”
     “Good call, Amigo. She died last week at age 96 in Queensland.” Silence again. L.T. scours the entertainment pages in his off hours. Entertainment Weekly, Movie Fan, Cinema.
     “That bothers me,” I say. I look back at the top of the windows and we have our own strange winds to worry about. I can see the glass go concave—as if the building were aspirating—and then ease back flat. The wind has picked up so much the rain drops are moving along the tops of the windows leaving tracks like veins. It is like being at the end of a car wash.
     While Kitty is off entertaining her nicotine addiction, Dee Dee and some of the other Snack-Machines decorate her desk with balloons, crepe paper streamers, and cakes, cupcakes, brownies, Rice Krispies treats, and two pies. “Oh, what the fuck?” Kitty says when she comes steadily back from her smoke.
     “Happy Birthday, Kitty,” Dee Dee says and begins a chorus of the birthday song. Other Snack-Machines begin singing and moving from their desks, converging on the sugary foods, like the chorus in a musical about chocolate.
Kitty is, as usual, put off. “Whose fucking idea was this? Dee Dee?”
     “Yepper-Depper-Stepper-Doo,” Dee Dee says and begins slicing smallish pieces of cake onto paper plates.
     “You look more beautiful every year, Kitty,” L.T. offers, then pinches her butt. L.T. can do this. More of a grab, really, given the enormity of L.T.’s mitt and the straight-legged smallness of Kitty’s backside.
Kitty doesn’t flinch, “You don’t want to go there, L.T.”
     “You’re old enough now. No more foolin’ around. When we gonna go out, Kitty?” I could never figure out if L.T.’s flirting was rooted in actual desire. But then, Rhoda likes to tell me, I’m not all that perceptive about people and their moods; mostly I try not to care. When I first took this job—and L.T. and Kitty and Geoff were all new faces to me—I called my father and told him I didn’t think I’d last out here, in the east. There was a conspicuous communication problem with everyone I met my first few weeks in Kalamazoo. They acted like they had to sound out everything I said in their heads, slowly, to understand me.
     And there’s a void where their dreams should be. This seemed so brutally obvious to me when I arrived for work my first day. I was fresh from college when my big brother Zach, who had done his mission7 in Battle Creek and made a contact with F.O.A. and come aboard in ’82, got me this job. I would ask what everyone did with their weekends, and Kitty, L.T., and Geoff, all several years older than me, said they liked to go to the bars sometimes, go to movies. I don’t know exactly what I thought when I got out of college, but I knew there had to be more to life than going to work and going home at night, maybe a bar, maybe a movie. There had to be more important destinations ahead, plans to be hatched, things that needed doing that were yours to only do and that you could only do now that you had a real job and a real paycheck. But paychecks can’t stretch that far. They can’t turn into something they’re not. At best, they pile up enough so you feel safe, and one week turns into one month. One month turns into one year. Two thousand miles, I think, must turn into two million.
     So I made friends at work. But when I would try to broach the subject of my dissatisfaction with Geoff or L.T., I knew right away they wouldn’t understand. L.T. wanted a job in one of the upstairs offices; Geoff wanted to fix his car and drive it. He wanted his softball team to win a trophy. These aren’t dreams, though; these aren’t things that anyone needed some singularity or deeply held belief to accomplish. They’re goals, hopeful ambitions, at best! Like thinking the Jazz can win the title. It might happen, but it never really happens. And when I told my dad about how depressing it was to live so much of my life this way, he told me I was about to learn a hard lesson. We didn’t speak to one another for more than a year except through my mother. It was the same way before I went to college, having blown my mission calling. We hit a dry spell then, and didn’t talk to each other for two years.
     I learned, as time went on in Kalamazoo and at F.O.A., that Kitty dreamed of owning a trailer home in Arizona where her brother lives, and that Geoff wanted his little girl to go to college. Everyone is like an onion, my father would probably tell me, and I’ve got to peel it all back before I go deciding there’s nothing in the middle. Maybe it’s the act of knowing, no matter the process, no matter the outcome, that I resent. Knowledge is limitation, belief is possibility, and faith and hope, somewhere between the two, is what I’m after.
     “You do know what L.T. stands for, don’t you.”
     “Loose Testicles?” Kitty says and begins to laugh, hard.
     “Long Tongue,” L.T. says. “Long Tongue.”
     “Save it for your lesbian friends, L.T.” Kitty says.
     “We’ll get a room at a nice hotel, the Radisson . . .”
     “Keep dreaming, L.T.”
     “You know what I hate about nice hotels?” L.T. says, leveling out.
     “When,” Kitty asks, “have you ever been in a nice hotel?”
     “When they put those chocolates on your bed. When they put those chocolates on your bed and you come in late and you’re drunk and you don’t remember there might be chocolates on your bed, because, frankly, why the fuck would there be chocolates on your bed, and you wake up in the middle of the night and you reach down and you think ‘Oh my God! I pooped the bed.’”
     “You stole that,” Kitty says, though she’s laughing in spite of herself.
     “Even if I stole it, that means it’s still mine,” L.T. says, and I pretend not to be listening.
     The wind outside dies down. The window, still streaked with veins of raindrops, has stalled against the charcoal sky. I imagine the skyline below, the thick forest of evergreens and pines holding their colors against the looming gray, the web of birch branches crackling in the delicate rain. I envy the grounds crew, even in the chill rain, sucking at the moist air, hauling chipped pine and cedar and tending the bulbs that woke up too early this year and, in spite of several slow freezes, had been blinking their cat-eye yellows, fleshy peaches and blues, the past two weeks.
     I often joked with the Amigos that the grounds crew sprays for birds. The Corporate Woods are surrounded on three sides by an occlusion of trees and yet, on the lunch patio, on warmer days, you can not hear the song of a single bird. L.T.’s theory is that Upjohn-Pharmacia dumps its chemicals just behind the trees, and he has imagined, in some detail, featherless and overgrown birds, so mucousy from sores that discarded pine needles adhere to their oozing, lopsided bodies, perfect for camouflage, their beaks cracked and jagged as teeth, stalking the woods like wolverines, feeding on equally scant squirrels and mice. It’s only because of their uncanny ability to be absolutely silent that they are able to survive.
     Despite the lack of sun I know Rhoda is probably awake, and while everyone is huddled around Kitty’s desk picking apart and devouring Dee Dee’s spread, I turn my back and call her. Rhoda answers after two rings, gravel-voiced, and obviously not yet awake. “Hello?” I am quiet for a moment, projecting myself through the phone and picturing myself curled up behind Rhoda under her warm cotton comforter. Then I picture her alone.
     Rhoda is large, but not round like Dee Dee. Rhoda is angular, olive-skinned, imposing, with wide hip bones that jut out like the ivory handles on my grandmother’s bureau. I often tease Rhoda that her strawberry blond hair is as coarse and wild as a tumbleweed, something she has never seen except on the television. Her face sometimes looks as if it is literally swimming through that hair, which smells sharp and tart like her kelp shampoo. Her soft lips are as pink as the inside of a conch shell.
     “Brian?”
     Her voice, scratchy, tentative, chills me and I hang up. It sounded like Jaimy’s voice, and suddenly I am haunted by an image of Jaimy—spectral and rising, lone and pale.
Jaimy, like Rhoda, was angular, but more fragile, and taller—almost six feet of ghostly limbs and translucent flesh waiting to spin or break apart. Sometimes it seemed she was standing over me, floating away, or hovering. But that sense that she was breakable made her seem smaller somehow than she was at the same time. I remember the blue veins in her breasts and how I would trace them toward the skin covering her breastbone, beneath which her heart beat (I’d place my ear to her there and listen).
     The last time I heard her voice was a call at three o’clock in the morning the year I moved to Kalamazoo. “Hi Brian, it’s Jaimy,” the voice had said. A long pause—“My mother has died.” I was drunk.
     Kitty reached over me and deposited a plate saturated with the sugary bric-a-brac. “Here, Momo, I’m not going to eat all this shit.” She calls me Momo or worse. The grease seeps from the desserts into the paper of the plate like a halo or an aura.
     “Thanks, Kitty,” I say. She knows I’ve sworn off the stuff. She picks at a piece of cake and smiles over at Dee Dee, who is grabbing at another brownie. Dee Dee reminds me of my aunt Katrina, on my mother’s side; warm and positive in an earthy, maternal way—a Venus-of-Willendorf way. Dee Dee was the first person who seemed genuinely interested in anything I might say when I moved to Kalamazoo, and I always have felt kindly toward her for that, for simply seeming to care. Her onion has a center, I think, and I don’t need to peel it back any farther.
     Carly, the supervisor, walks down our aisle. She wears red, F.O.A.’s official color, every day. She’s just returned from having her hysterectomy, and I wonder if there’s an appropriate sentiment for such a procedure. What does it mean to have your reproductive organs removed when you’re still young, like Carly? “Happy Birthday, Kitty.” It’s insincere. She would fire Kitty if she could. She is like a hyena arriving amongst a group of vultures, and the Snack-Machines fill their plates again and fly away, one by one, back to their desks. Caw. Hiss. “How old are you today?”
     “A day older than yesterday and still younger than you.” Kitty offers Carly a plate and then clears a place to resume her research. “What did you get me, Carly?”
     “Another smoke break.”
     Kitty looks at her watch and then at Geoff and L.T. and me, bouncing her eyebrows, grabs her jacket and says, “Well around here sugar melts, but shit floats.” She sails out to the loading dock where she’ll light her cigarette and suck it ashless in under five minutes. She does most everything like she’s killing snakes.
     That was one of the first things that struck me when I came to Kalamazoo. People smoke here. They sell cigarettes in Utah, certainly, and you occasionally see people light up—at concerts, at ski lodges, at places where a lot of people gather and where it’s assumed people might smoke. But in Kalamazoo nearly half the people I’ve met smoke, they drink hard for nights on end, and fly in the face of most of the Words of Wisdom8. There are nearly as many smoky cafes as there are bars.
     My dad never minded having the occasional drink, though, and in fact his favorite Mormon joke went like this: Q: ‘Why do you take two Mormons fishing?’ A: ‘Because if you just take one, he’ll drink all your beer.’ Ha ha. I learned to drink from my father and improvised the rest.
When Carly leaves with her haul, I redial Rhoda. “That was me earlier,” I confess. “I could hear you, but I guess you couldn’t hear me, so I hung up. It was a bad connection.”
     “I needed to get out of bed,” Rhoda says, her voice smoothed over by now. I know Mr. Mysterious isn’t there because there is no pretend in her voice. I imagine she has risen and turned on her hot water. I have convinced her to wean herself off coffee and she has agreed to cut back to morning tea, though I feel it is only better for her because it’s more transparent. I told her, after we visited a cafe for one of our first dates (a date spent criticizing the way patrons slumped over their mocha-lattes trying to look très-chic) that I liked these people better when they were all drinking alcohol. (There are bars in Salt Lake City and I know most of them.)
     Rhoda will have brushed her rawboned, frosty teeth; they are attractive, and she tends them like prize roses. I imagine her flipping her hair, can hear it brush against the receiver, and I want, more than anything, to be crawling from her bed myself. I tell her I will call her again soon, when I’m not flooded with work. “It’s good to hear your voice first thing in the morning,” she says, and hangs up.
     Kitty slings back into her seat like a gunfighter’s piece into its holster and talks to me while she orders her research. “Hey Momo, did you hear about Carly’s hysterectomy?”
     “No,” I say. “I don’t think it’s something I need to know about.”
     “Her husband sent her flowers and a card that said, ‘CONGRATS! IT’S A BOY!’ Isn’t that a hoot?” Kitty tries to push my buttons, and I let her. It’s her birthday. “We went out with my sister and her kid last night. He’s a little doll. A fucking doll! He’s only two and she’s got him standing on the table at Chianti’s telling the waitress ‘Well bite my teeny weenie!’” Kitty begins to laugh. “Bite my teeny weenie! Ha! Ha ha!”
     “That’s hysterical,” I say.
     “Say it for the woman,” L.T. cuts in, his voice chopped by the fan. He has been trying to get me to say “Don’t love me like you do, ladies” for months now. He saw this in a movie and thinks it would be funny to hear it come from my mouth. Kitty and Geoff think it would be funny. I don’t.
     I fade out, hearing only pieces of Kitty’s story. I hear “Hey Mabel—get off the table! The dollar’s for the beer!” several times. I hear L.T. say “Ice Princess,” the fan cutting his voice.
     I can feel myself taking shape in Rhoda’s empty bed, my body assembling under her comforter. I can feel the nylon stitching on my naked shoulders and the clean sheets ripple under my heels. When I call Rhoda I will tell her to remind me to call my father when I get home tonight. I imagine my way through the rest of the day and in the late afternoon I make my way through the exiting Snack-Machines to my Bronco. The sun is breaking the clouds apart like a rescue team breaks the ice, pulling victims from an avalanche. But there is still so much rain and snow.

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1 First of America, one of the largest and newest banks in West Michigan. The building mentioned by Brian is the Corporate Woods Complex; the F.O.A. name is left off the complex so as to make the building less readily noticeable to unsolicited salespeople, infuriated customers and enraged former employees. F.O.A.’s other principal hubs include Indiana, Illinois and Florida. (Back)

2 The founder of the Mormon church. In 1829 Joseph Smith, along with ten other men, was visited by the angel Moroni carrying the golden tablets. These tablets, or plates, were about six inches wide, eight inches long, and about the thickness of common tin. Only Joseph Smith could look upon the tablets, using the breastplate with Urim and Thummim (a device similar to reading glasses), and translate these books. If he showed them to anyone else, he would be destroyed. He proceeded to translate the tablets, through a curtain, into The Book of Mormon. This “new” text extends the works of the Bible to the Americas in the period roughly from 2300 B.C. to A.D. 400. According to the book, the Lamanites, referring to Native Americans thought to be one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, were preached to by Jesus Christ when he visited this new kingdom of the lost Israelites. This first church of the Americas flourished until it fell into apostasy. It remained that way until, as foretold in the golden tablets, the kingdom could be reclaimed by Joseph Smith. Mark Twain, referring to the not-always-successful biblically-appropriated tone and language of The Book of Mormon, once described it as “chloroform in print.” God also commanded Smith to revise parts of the Bible that had been, according to Smith, corrupted by Christians and Jews over the centuries. Many of these changes and additions were aimed at helping the two books justify and support each other. (Back)

3 The Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah has a solid gold statue of the Angel Moroni blowing his trumpet perched on its highest spire. Disturbingly, when the statue was last taken down to be cleaned it was discovered that it had been shot at several times. It is the ambition of all good Mormons to sanctify their marriage in the Temple, where, in a secret ceremony attended only by the Temple elders and the bride and groom, they are bound together for eternity. (Back)

4 Unlike most Christian-based religions, the L.D.S. Church is a church without a professional clergy. Instead, they rely on a centralized, though incredibly organized, authority operating out of Salt Lake City. The Church is ruled by a hierarchy controlled by unanimous vote at church conferences. At the top of this hierarchy is the church president. Like the pope, the president serves until death. However, unlike Catholicism’s College of Cardinals who lose their power to vote in a new leader, the same life-long tenure applies to the next tier in the Mormon hierarchy; the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles who generally “vote in” the longest-serving of their members. Gordon B. Hinckley was sworn in as church president a little time before the start of Brian’s story. There was some controversy that Hinckley had actually served longer when his predecessor, Spencer W. Kimball, became seriously disabled following a third brain operation from 1981 until he died in 1985. Kimball’s successor, Ezra Taft Benson, who took office at the age of 86, was said, by his grandson, Steve Benson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist for the Arizona Republic, to be struggling with senility, and functioning only to “perpetuate the myth, the fable . . .” that he was capable of acting as the living prophet of the Mormon church. The lower levels of power in the Mormon church fall entirely to appointed “volunteer” leaders, most of whom come from the business community and who have little to no formal theological training or education. The regional unit, called the stake after the poles used to hold up the sacred tabernacle where biblical Israel worshiped, is similar to a Catholic diocese. The smaller wards, the term used for subdivisions of municipalities in Joseph Smith’s time, is similar to a parish. Overseeing these wards are bishops, with the divisions being entirely geographic. A bishop’s ordained power, however, should not be underestimated based on the privileging of his business acumen over his religious training. A bishop’s discretionary powers include the granting or withholding of temple recommends that members need in order to, among other things: be admitted to a temple; allow a father to baptize his own son; have a marriage blessed in the temple; allow parents to give the traditional talk as their children depart for their missions; or be accepted for missions. Members must meet annually for an interview with their bishop to receive these important recommends.
The Mormon Church demands a heavy commitment from its members. To receive their recommend members must tithe ten percent of their income, abstain from smoking and drinking, give up two meals each month and donate the money saved to their highly effective internal welfare system, and young men must commit to a two year mission that their families must pay for. Without a temple recommend, members are essentially second class citizens of the Mormon Church. (Back)

5 The National Basketball Association team the Utah Jazz. The New Orleans Jazz entered the league on March 7, 1974, as the 18th member of the league for a $6.15 million expansion franchise fee. In a trade with the Atlanta Hawks the Jazz acquired future hall-of-famer ‘Pistol’ Pete Maravich as their first player. Maravich, along with being the Jazz’ top scoring threat, was a showman. He wore a signature pair of floppy good-luck sweatsocks that always appeared to need washing. He shot the ball from everywhere and anywhere, and he never made a simple pass when he could make an entertaining one, so his assists regularly came from behind the back or through the legs. After the 1978–79 season the struggling Jazz’ ownership announced plans to move from New Orleans to Salt Lake City, Utah. Around the league the news was received with raised eyebrows and predictable jokes about taking a team named the Jazz into the staid atmosphere of Salt Lake City. The term ‘jazz,’ indisputably African American in origin, originally referred to sexual activity in addition to its obvious reference to the New Orleans based musical style. The term gradually came to refer to any vigorous or enthusiastic activity, and appeared in print for the first time in 1913 in a reference to a baseball team. When the team made its move to Salt Lake it was so broke they didn’t believe they could afford the cost of new uniforms and a name change. The name, however, was embraced by the community and stuck, becoming one in a long line of moves by the predominantly Mormon state to help redefine its reputation and character. Maravich, who was eventually waived by the Jazz in 1980, missed seeing the Jazz’s rise to respect. Eight years after being waived by the Jazz, the splashy, exciting Pistol Pete Maravich suffered a fatal heart attack during a pickup game of basketball in California. He was 40 years old. (Back)

6 Karl Malone was drafted out of Louisiana Tech as the 13th pick in the 1985 NBA Draft. He’s originally from Summerfield, LA., population 200. At 6’9”, 256 lbs, he had the size and inside moves to attract a lot of attention, but had consistent trouble at the free-throw line in college. After several seasons with the Jazz, Malone purchased a black eighteen wheeler, complete with a mural depicting Malone on horseback herding cattle on a mountain range and an enlarged portrait of Malone in a cowboy hat on the side of his truck. In the off-season Malone likes to make runs in his truck, especially into Idaho where his wife is from. She and her twin sister are beauty queens, Karl’s wife winning the Miss Idaho pageant a year before they married. Malone has since expanded his trucking company into a fleet of trucks, and has used the profits to help finance a hog farm his family operates in Arkansas. (Back)

7 Young boys are encouraged to begin saving their money when they are in junior high so that they might get accepted to and finance a mission for the L.D.S. church. They’re the kids you see riding around town on their bicycles in tandem in dark suits, wearing name tags that read ‘Elder Peterson,’ ‘Elder Berry,’ what not. They are sent to homes to home teach and to assist new converts. Largely because of this missionary system the Mormon church is one of the most aggressive and fastest growing churches in the world. While young girls are not directly discouraged by the church from going on missions, they are rather encouraged to obtain the illustrious promise ring (a ring essentially promising their engagement upon the missionary’s return) from a departing missionary and work on filling their hope chest (not a literal chest, but a collection of necessities for married life—china, quilts, trivets). Once recommended by their bishop and accepted by the church for a mission the prospective missionaries are sent to M.T.C. (Missionary Training Camp) in Provo for a crash course in missionary work. If the prospective missionary shows an affinity for foreign languages, he is quickly and effectively taught a foreign language, complete with local colloquialisms and idioms, and sent to a foreign country. The swift and effectual teaching of languages by the M.T.C. is admired the world over. (Back)

8 The Words of Wisdom, often mistakenly seen as simply a kind of tea totalling mentality, advise Mormons not to drink hot beverages, not to drink alcoholic or caffeinated beverages, to refrain from smoking and premarital relations. While disregarding these Words is not ‘sin’ in the eyes of the L.D.S. Church, they are so strongly discouraged that in certain circles and locales (Brigham Young University, for example) they are strictly enforced by the Powers that Be. When Jim McMahon (the quarterback of the Superbowl Champion Chicago Bears the year Brian graduated from Davis High School), a non-Mormon from nearby Roy, Utah, was attending B.Y.U. he was often, much to the embarrassment of the school and church, very vocal about the Words of Wisdom and did his best to break every one of them while he was breaking NCAA passing records. He was generally perceived as a ‘charming Gentile.’ (Back)

From The Salt Palace by Darren DeFrain All Rights Reserved.

No part of this may reproduced or copied without permission of New Issues Press. This is a work of fiction. The author would like to acknowledge that the details of Utah history were gleaned from many sources, but none more so than the very excellent Mondo Utah by Trent Harris, Dream Garden Press, 1996.

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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