 I should have turned and run for the woods when at first I heard her name: Molly Strait. Because she was everything it intimated: a straight-laced Molly Mormon. Only I didn’t know a Molly Mormon from the Queen of Sheba, so I had to find out the hard way. You know, getting lifted to the heavens and then dropped on my butt.
A Molly Mormon, just for the record, is a young pink-cheeked thing—usually blonde, by the way—who’s never done anything so bad even as split her Oreo and eat just the cream. But before I knew her name I simply knew what she looked like: sweet-dream lovely, with bright auburn hair hanging in natural cascades clear to her fine and dandy blue-jean fanny. Her daddy had probably been disappointed about the hair, not being blonde and all. It was when she turned and looked at me, staring at her, that I saw her eyes were emerald green. I couldn’t even turn away, and she froze, herself, for a moment.
Which, as much as I liked the look, kind of broke my concentration and, I have to say, my will. I was the first one to look away and get on the bus.
See, I was in college, but not quite your typical Mormon freshman. I was 22 and fresh off the road, or should I say, fresh off the mountain, though I suppose either one would do. Four months earlier I’d been minding my business, sitting out under the pine trees smoking a joint with the open baggie and a pack of ZigZags right there on the tabletop, picking my guitar, when a couple of boys in suits walked up the driveway. I said Suits.
Now you have to understand, our driveway was a good set of ruts digging their way up the red-dirt slope of a pinyon-pine covered hillside half a mile from US Highway 64 heading east out of Taos, New Mexico. Seven of us, from time to time, but usually just the four of us—me and Lisa, Steve and Rosey—living in an old Bluebird bus with a chimney. Actually, it was a just stove pipe, the bottom end anchored onto a nice little Yotul cast iron woodburner Mark Lambert and Pippin Francis had rounded up at a flea market down in Santa Fe one day about four years before.
That was before I got there. Actually, that was before any of us came together, everyone still scattered hither and yon across the butter and bacon and Saturday-morning pancakes patchwork of suburban America, all living with our mommies and daddies in their quiet desperation looking for something to take away the pain. Then my mom died almost overnight.
Pain relief for me came in the form of a blonde guitar and a long, black highway. Any highway, as long as it was narrow and quiet and led to somewhere far away. Mine eventually led from west Texas to New Mexico, by way of everything between east and west including Minnesota, Montana, and Monterey. I met Lisa Deru while lying around in the shade of Redrocks Ampitheater up in Colorado, waiting for Radiohead to take the stage. She was all alone, heading home to Norman, Oklahoma, heaven forbid, after a bad year at Colorado School of Mines, her wanting to be an engineer and the guys wanting her to be the dorm mascot, so to speak. Anyway, we eventually headed north together, clear to the Black Hills, but finally back to the south where we first met Pippin at a laundromat in Taos and he invited us up to share his Bluebird. And then one day these two Mormon boys blow a timing chain out on the two-lane and follow the guitar picking right up to my sweet little spread.
The guy out in front says “Hey,” and gives a little wave. Me, I kind of froze, thinking here come the Fibbies, ready to fling my herb to the four winds and dash for the high country, but his companion, what they call each other, kind of stalls out ten feet behind him when he sniffs the smoke signals and kinda whines, “Elder, let’s go back out to the highway!” Well, I’d heard “Elder” before, and then I see the black name tags and relax.
“Mick Phanton,” I said, offering my hand. “Pull up a stump.”
We’d had a couple of these boys in our livingroom one time, my mom letting them in out of the west Texas sun for a lemonade, and my dad the Air Force officer comes home and freaks his flippin’ lid. Walks right up to one of them, who had stood out of respect and to shake his hand, and bumps chests with the guy. Knocked him right on his butt back into the couch calling him “Mr. Preacher Boy” and crap like that. Boys excused themselves real kindly and split.
So here I got them on my own turf, and I invite them up, cramming the image of my dad into any corner I can cram it. Guy in front, dude called “Elder Johnson,” says, “That’s pretty good pickin’,” like he knows what he’s talking about, and starts looking around for a place to sit.
I’m motioning him toward a cut-off tree stump and the other guy, “Elder Call,” asks me if they could use my phone, car broke down out on the road.
It’s actually Johnson laughs first, saying, “Dude, he lives in a school bus!” And so I laugh, too, figuring Suit Number One isn’t that scary, and then Lisa walks out of the bus putting her shirt on. As she walked. These two boys thinking, what the heck, and me thinking, yeah, she’s a peach.
Anyway, just to be nice I offer them both a toke and Johnson says no thanks but Call’s just staring at Lisa, then Johnson, like, is this heaven or hell? Lisa wasn’t ugly.
Well, long story short, me and Johnson exchange some licks on my Taylor and then I load them into my ’72 VW Toaster bus (it was a little boy at a gas station in Tacoma called it that one time, which is just what it looked like) and give ’em a ride to a phone booth outside the Chronicle newspaper offices up in Angel Fire. Nearest phone I know of, not being much of a user myself. These two are missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, what my tenth-grade history teacher back in Barksdale called “Mormons,” and they’re out seeking searching souls.
Crawling up the mountain to Angel Fire, Johnson had asked me if they could come out sometime, talk about Jesus. I looked in the rear-view and notice Elder Call just looking out the window as the scrub oaks zoomed by at about 28 miles per hour, and decided to say yeah just to spite him. Not to say I wasn’t searching. Well Call looks up at me and our eyes meet in the mirror, his a lot bigger than mine.
They taught me right there in the Bluebird, Lisa and Rosemary hanging around for the first missionary lesson, and then just Lisa for the next two. Steve refusing to come in, just sitting outside sucking reefer and strumming my guitar or dinking around under the hood of the VW. My VW. (Course, he figured it was his Bluebird, since he got there the year before we did.)
Well damned if I don’t, excuse my French, love everything they tell me over the next three weeks. And I go and get myself baptized a Mormon up in Eagle Nest Lake. Call had said the proper thing to do was go to the Mormon chapel clear down in Taos, get dipped in a little pool right there in the building; the official way to do it. But I kind of fake-shuddered and told them I was afraid of water inside buildings and Johnson laughed and said, “Dude, the pond it is!”
By mid-May I was sleeping in the Toaster, the Elders having committed me to the premarital chastity thing. Lisa was still in the bus, and we were still in love, arms-length, but she just wasn’t trucking with the religion thing. Interested, half-willing, but mostly just confused. I wondered if we’d last out the year.
But then I find out about the Mormon college up in Rexburg, Idaho and start thinking about that, asking myself, what am I doing, where am I going? Living in a bus and mending fence for the ranchers and playing little coffee house gigs once or twice a month and stuffing cash money into an old fishing tackle box. My dad a dark, distant, and bitter memory. Mostly. Sometimes just wanting to go back and bump chests with the SOB and say what gave you the right? and then wanting to hug him and cry and be ten again and throw a football and thinking of my mom all along.
Hell.
So the Mormon college thing: I turn in the application showing no high school diploma—I believe I was lying on a rock on the west side of Flathead Lake in Montana about the time the kids back in Abilene were walking the aisle or the plank or whatever they do. But I’d done pretty well on the ACT and Ernie Begay, my church leader there in Taos, gave me a great letter of recommendation and the school let me in, public school paperwork be damned.
Lisa talked about coming with me, living in the Toaster, separate bedrolls, but in the end I left her standing there in my rear-view mirror crying and holding her arms tight across her chest like a little girl whose family dog was going off to be put down.
Like she was cold.
August in New Mexico.
Left her standing there.
I spent some down time of my own heading north to Idaho. Except for the occasional nighttime Norah Jones cry-in-your-beer moan-along, I kept the music off and just drove, thinking, man I been everywhere and never got nowhere. Me and the Toaster and my Taylor; I didn’t even own a dog.
Solemn.
Scared. But pretty sure I knew what I was doing.
I was assigned to a two-bedroom apartment designed to accommodate three other guys, two per room, but one of them never got there. Bob Bellison and Colin Walker were “RMs,” returned missionaries—guys like Elder Johnson who had already finished their two year stint, Bob in Chicago and Colin in Sweden. They had arrived first and chosen separate bedrooms, each praying the third and especially fourth roommates never showed up. Only I did, so Colin very kindly invited me to take the other bed in his room. Bob never offered.
Which was fortuitous if for no other reason than I would have gone nuts with Bob. Colin and I hit it off quickly, he being very interested in my status as a recent convert, something that justified and kind of fulfilled for him everything he’d done for two years in Sweden, not a single person ever becoming a Mormon under his tutelage. He was ever solicitous, instructive, patient. Bob, on the other hand, was disingenuous at best, offering a false-front smile that usually masked a seeming fear that I was infected or something, like what gave me the right to think I was a real Mormon? He was pioneer stock, after all; his forebears had lived in Missouri and fled from the persecutions there in the 1830s. I told him once I was descended from Missouri pioneer stock, too: my forebears had been the ones ran his forebears clear the hell out of Jackson County and onto the Mormon Trail. Which wasn’t true, as far as I know, but it got him out of our room.
My main problem with Bob: He wanted to be a concert producer or event management type of guy. He was a dancer on the college ballroom dance team and chairman of the college Cultural Programs Council, responsible in large measure for the type of talent that performed in campus venues, large and small. Colin told him early on that I was a guitar player/ songwriter—he’d listened to me and I was good—and Bob had kind of looked at me like yeah, right, actually doing a little flinch with his deprecatory smile.
First day in Idaho I go talk to a lady in academic advisement, saying, whadaya got? Meaning, things to study.
And she said, you’re kidding?
I said, lady, the only thing on my mind coming up here was to learn how to really be a Mormon, maybe even get ready for a mission, like Elder Johnson and Colin, go be Mr. Preacher. I really meant that; I really wanted to go someday, something that gets in the blood of a young man wanting to find peace and do something worth doing that doesn’t include joining the military. Gets in your blood. So the lady actually sat there with me for forty minutes, her offer, asking me about my life, what I liked, where I’d been (she said “Oh my heck” maybe thirty times, that being the most common Mormon expletive), where I wanted to go. Several times I said anywhere but Texas, but then finally zeroed in on the natural sciences, something like forestry, or maybe geology, both of which had occupied my child’s mind a lot when we were living in Iceland. Either way, far as I could get from Texas.
Finally this lady, “Sister Brewer,” opens the book to an optional program available to natural science majors: an eight-week seminar on the road, I’m kidding you negative, traveling in a bus, sleeping in tents, real live field study getting college credit in geology, biology, English (we’d keep a graded journal), botany, even physical ed, as they’d be kicking our booties up and down mountains and canyons all over the western states.
I said, Sister? this college thing is tight, y’all. And she said, huh?
In the lazy hours and days before school started, Colin would often take me down to the Arctic Circle for a malt or show me around campus or just sit and talk with me for hours. Colin carried a double burden: he was nearing 26, still unmarried—rare in Mormondom; and his kidneys were beginning to fail. One night in the livingroom, Bob out playing the social game neither Colin nor I found an interest in, he told me the kidney thing he could live with, even if it killed him. It was the spouse thing that was eating at his guts.
See in Mormon theology, the family is right there with Christ as the center of faith. Marriage is one of the highest aspirations, marriage in one of the Church’s temples one of the highest sacraments. Colin didn’t even have a girlfriend. He was so desperate he asked me for counsel. He was reasonably good looking, polite, and comfortably gregarious. He had talents, interests, and certainly a kind heart. He said every time he had ever gotten two or three dates with the same girl somehow the failing health often came up. He was honest and up front about it, nothing hidden. But in fact he rarely got a second or third date, let alone a first one. What to do?
I had no answers, I’ll tell ya, but I really hurt for the guy. Losing a woman... hell; never having one...? Sheesh.
Three days later all us Road-Seminar kids are putting our gear in the belly of a big travel bus and preparing to hit the road, 33 of us plus two professors and a bus driver named Earl. Idaho boy. The first thing I noticed about our group was a lot of flannel and scarves or headbands. The second thing was a specific student body running a brush through her waist-length locks on the far side of the crowd. She saw me staring at her, like I said before, a real sweet honey with hair the color of Flame and Trouble, and just stared back. No smile, just this hard stare, saying, I suppose, whattheheck you looking at and what you gonna do about it? A real challenge.
So I shake it off and lead the charge onto the bus, a lot bigger than my old Bluebird, plus with air conditioning and a toilet in the back. Couldda used one of those back in NM. We say a group prayer and head north toward Yellowstone National Park, stopping for lunch at a wide spot in the road just as we climbed up off the Snake River Plain and entered the Island Park volcano caldera. I was standing on a rock humming a Freddy Jones tune and looking out over the country below us (Flat, but not Texas) when this girl Molly came up and offered me a sandwich, tentative at first, but then a gentle smile. Beautiful teeth. And something went sproing in my guts.
I had never kissed a girl seriously until Lisa Deru, and that didn’t happen overnight, lemme tell you, not after her rough year at college. I had had a lot of girl friends, but no romances. Never really cared much until my mom died, and then I wanted something real bad and took my guitar and the open road as valid place-holders until Lisa came along. And so Lisa had been my everything and my only thing until the Mormon thing became the Big Thing.
Molly and I introduced ourselves, or at least she did: Carey, Idaho, oldest daughter of a farmer, child number two of eight, daddy’s first child in college. I was visibly thrown off, not wanting to talk Texas at all but neither knowing how to explain New Mexico or the years in between. I’d had to practice that with all the Mormons back in Taos, and had never gotten it down real smooth or without a lot of explanatory mumbling—lifers were shocked, the other converts and the Mexican-Indians more than mildly intrigued. So I blundered: “And your mom?”
To which she kind of froze up. Staring me right in half without blinking, she said, “Why would you ask about my mom?”
I stared back, wavering a little but magnetized by her eyes, and said, “Sorry, you just didn’t mention your mother. I was only trying to round out the picture.”
She stared at me another couple moments, then exhaled and looked away. She said quietly, “My mom died of cancer when I was fifteen,” and that was all it took. We were seatmates after lunch, Molly grabbing her daypack and telling the guy next to me to go meet someone new—smiling all the while.
My mom picked out her own casket two days before she died. Pointed to it in the “Elliott-Hamil Garden of Memories” brochure right there in the hospital. Couldn’t talk any longer. Of course, she only had three weeks to even know she was dying. Glioblastoma multiforme: aggressive brain cancer. We hardly had time to learn to pronounce the friggin’ disease. Two weeks of gradually worsening headaches, then the diagnosis, then three weeks to die. Three freaking Dog Damn What’s The Use Adios weeks to say goodbye. My mother.
Major Hell.
After she died I got the headache, too, only mine was in the form of a 24-year veteran of the United States Air Force: Chief Master Sargent M. Cyrus Phanton, Dyess Air Force Base, Abilene, Texas. By way of Barksdale, Louisiana; Keflavik, Iceland; and Blytheville, Arkansas. So as you can see, I hadn’t seen much of anything worth seeing in my 17 years.
My dad was always a tough guy. Had a funny last name that kids took advantage of until he got bigger, and tougher, than any of them. Then he didn’t go to officer’s school, just the recruiting office in Lilburn, Georgia, so he made up for both by busting his and everyone else’s butts for 21 years, including mine. Oh, he was a real dad, I suppose, and a good man. Even introduced me to the guitar. He never hurt my mother, but man was he tough on me and my little brother Curtis sometimes. But when mama got sick, and then went away like a Russian thistle in a west Texas windstorm he just went nuts. Then he went inside. He disappeared.
So I did the same, hoping Curtis, then 14, could outlive the funk. He did, thankfully, and is now in his third year of engineering school in Galveston. Says dad is almost a whole human being again, although he’s not too sure how he’d take me if I were to show up after five years and three postcards. And a Mormon to boot, which is something I’ve told Curtis quite a bit about.
One afternoon we climbed Yellowstone’s Mt. Washburn, then ate brown-bag dinners cuddled up into the base of the summit fire lookout, a cabin sitting atop a framework of huge thirty-foot logs. Everyone but me turned their backs into the stiffening September wind to await the rising of the full moon. I stood up and stared right into it, thinking oddly of the fireball dustbowl sunsets out over Big Spring and Odessa when all my travel partners start singing a song I’d never heard before, a church hymn they’d all learned as kids. It was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard. I said to Molly, what is this? And she looked up at me weird and said “I am a child of God.”
I am a child of God
and he has sent me here.
Has given me an earthly home
and parents kind and dear.
Lead me, guide me
walk beside me,
help me finds the way.
Teach me all
that I must do
to live with him some day.
They all sang on, two verses, and I listened and kind of hummed along and then got tears in my eyes, all these good Mormon boys and girls singing fundamental doctrine they’d known since they were three, sitting around the hearth with their mommies and daddies and a warm mug of cocoa and me tearing up and saying damn, I’ve wasted a lot of time and blown a lot of years and why didn’t I know this sooner? And they sang on, verse three, and the moon came up way out over the petrified forest and lit up their faces and I moved away to watch both the group and the moon, same time, because I’m crying anyway, and they sang on, Molly not even noticing me go. I looked away just at the moon, and at the woods, and wanted to be alone so bad, and so I moved quietly off into the trees and wandered off to stare at the sky and sit on a rock and they sang.
Then it got quiet and I sat on my rock and just looked out over the mountains, everything finally people-silent; just the mountaintop wind and the natural creaking of trees, sounds I knew real well. Me and the woods and the moonlight. I knew this gig; I was comfortable.
But I also knew I was right in between two worlds, the new and the old, and I was feeling almost an anxious fear. I’d never felt it in Taos. There I was just one of many converts in a church that got them all the time. I could look out my Bluebird window or down any regional road and know it; know the horizon, the smells in the air, where to find snowpack in June or raspberries in August. I could close my eyes, which I did, and see/smell/hear that world as clearly as if I was there.
But here I was struggling to keep my composure, even thinking of ditching the group and finding my own ride back. Back to Rexburg and my Toaster and the open road, maybe Taos, maybe western Montana, back to the cold deep waters of Flathead. Taking off. I felt my father breathing down my neck and wondered if I could really live up to being the New Me.
I finally wandered back up to the road, everybody else already gone, and followed it down by moonlight, coming on to the group a couple hundred yards above the bus. I kept my distance from everyone, just wandering alone, but then Molly was right at my side out of nowhere. She moved right up to me and we walked like that brushing shoulders for maybe fifty yards. She said, You okay? real gentle, and I wasn’t sure what to say so I just took her hand and she let me.
We pulled into the campground at around eleven p.m., a flat, grassy area overlooking Yellowstone Lake—Bridge Bay and Stevenson Island under the moon. I walked Molly out to the lakeshore for a look, but she just kept looking up at me with those shiny beautiful emerald greens with the snow white moon dancing its cross-country dance through the iris fields of her eyes, and I leaned down to kiss her, long, hard and full of conviction, not seeing Lisa anywhere at all.
And she turned her head and buried it in my shoulder.
After several moments, me just hanging on thinking what the hey, she looked up again and apologized, saying she had made a commitment to herself and to God that she would never kiss a man until she was over the altar in “the temple of our God,” exactly what she said.
And I said are you serious? And she said no one no where no how until I’m kneeling with the guy that’s forever, sorry. And I said ibbity ibbity schnit and went to bed seeing Lisa all over the place.
So that’s how we spent the next seven weeks, hand in hand, cuddling cozy in the long ride seat, and around campfires and up trails but never kissing. I tried it one other time, and she said, now Mitchell! Like my mother. She was even reluctant to call me Mick much of the time, thinking nicknames less than proper.
I should have gotten the hint then.
One Wednesday morning we all took off from the north rim of the Grand Canyon and came out five days later on the south, having walked right across that behemoth, the place John Wesley Powell’s expedition geologist, Clarence Dutton, described as being “a great innovation in modern ideas of scenery.” I’ll say. Try west Texas for seven years.
We did Church services in the dirt at Indian Gardens on Sunday. I had even packed a white shirt and tie, just to surprise everyone.
When we came out on the South Rim, I picked Molly a Sabbath bouquet of desert flowers: scarlet gilia (red), gaillardia (yellow-red), and sand verbena (white). She took it leaning way into me, rubbing her nose right up against my cheek and my lips, and said teasingly, “I know what you want.”
She didn’t have a clue.
Two weeks later on the way to Craters of the Moon in Idaho Molly rubs my neck all the way to Arco then runs her fingers around my tee-shirted chest, drawing flowers, clear to the National Monument campground. We set up our separate tents, girls on one side of the road, guys on the other, and then go for a walk into the dusty dusk. One point she turns around to check on me, checking on her, and she stops and looks through my heart and soul with those big green eyes and I bury my head in her luscious hair and inhale deeply and rub my hands up and down her back, right down to her belt line, then even to her back pants pockets, putting my hands right in, holding on, and she cuddles in tight and I say oh baby I love you, you’re so good for me. But she just says hmmm, real long, and rubs me back. And we just stand there rocking in the scrambled lava sunset, her wondering what I might do next and me wondering why she didn’t say it back.
I spent a lot of time alone that trip, especially once we got down to southern Utah, the absolute magic of the country just requiring the reverent focus of my whole soul. Sitting on a high slickrock wall above the Garden of Eden, no kidding, the real name of the place, just staring out at the distant, jagged rim of the San Rafael Swell, Molly comes up the ridge and finds me, at first just taking my hand, watching the sun, but then turning to face me, moving in close and pressing me right back onto my back on the warm rock. But instead of kissing me, like I was hoping, wishing, lord aching in my bones, she takes my other hand and pins both of them out straight, then leans back up and straddles me, sitting right there on the hard spot, and starts massaging my chest, my shoulders, my neck.
I came right out, told her what I wanted to do, and she said why do you think I’m pinning you down, you wild man, I’m saving you from yourself. And I said man are you naive, I’m bout to roll you into the desert dust and suck your face til it swells, maybe more, and she’s breathing hard then, blowing out her breath, one hand under my shirt, rubbing, and she says, oh man are we in trouble. Then she practically jumps up and runs back to the camp, leaving me in the smoke.
I sat up, alone again, and just stared off to the west, finally noticing that the sun was setting right smack in the middle of the Capitol Reef gap, going down, blinking out, like the end of an era. And I thought to myself: where on earth does this road lead?
I was in this whole new world, a world where the girls shaved their legs every other day and wore pretty little things in their hair and fancy dresses on Sunday and did things like dance and sing silly songs outside guys’ apartment windows and listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on Sunday mornings. (Not another person I had talked to in seven weeks had ever lived in a school bus with a wood stove.) And I figured that Molly’s footsteps were probably the ones I should follow. She would be my guide to the New World.
I didn’t have a clue.
Well that whole luscious lovely on-the-road-for-Jesus-and-Geology gig came to an end Halloween weekend, all of us having a barbeque back in Rexburg and me pulling Molly into a corner and saying this and that and baby you know I love you. Molly smiling sweetly, her green eyes swimming, but just saying hmmmm. And then the next Monday I’m in a real classroom, kinda gazing out the windows at first. I was continuing on the geology-forestry track, more or less.
What Molly wanted me to take was “Social Dance.”
Back in the city, stop lights and telephone wires and ice cream socials and girls in dresses and guys in Hondas and big diesel pickups, I was all of the sudden feeling way out of place. Molly actually said, okay, I’ve seen your world, come see mine. Like the previous eight weeks had just been a field trip, a pass-time. She said a prom was coming up, and explained to my vacant stare that that meant a dance, me never having been to one except as the lead guitarist in a mosh band back in 11th grade. That one, I’d never watched the dancing at all, just the flashing lights and the babe we had singing—Pinky Moline—and the drummer, Clifford Sambora, cranking like a turbine that gave me my juice. I’m slingin’ that ax so bad I fell off the freakin’ stage one time, couple joints in my blood, then climbed back up and whacked it some more, Cliff yellin’ “Hot Damn, boy, let’s rock!”
Social dance, she says, that will teach you all the steps, have you moving like a pro. Me, I’m thinking Brian Setzer, ranh, ranh, ranh; she’s thinking Celine Dion or Josh Groban or something, woo woo woo.
She’s not in the class, of course, she’s on the school Folkdance team, been on tour all around the state and all that. No, in the class are all the chicks couldn’t get a date on the Planet of the Apes, not very nice, but that’s what I’m thinking. The girls the gentlemen of Mormon collegiality call “sweet spirits.”
I’m also thinking, this is the most contrived, artificial, un-natural human activity I have ever witnessed, let alone put my hand and feet to, and what’s the use anyway, I’ve had two dollies in my arms ’n’ never left the farm.
So I’m half-hearted even when I’m faking it really well, blood barely pumping when I’m not, but Molly’s wanting to dance in two weeks.
Mid November comes the dance, me and Molly hitting on about five cylinders in a V-8 world. I show up at her apartment in a borrowed suit (Colin, bless his soul), me still just owning a couple ties and one white shirt, and the other guys are assembling as well, each of the four girls in the apartment set up right for the evening. Only I’m the one didn’t bring a flower.
Jeannine says, Where’s Molly’s corsage? Did you eat it, Wilderness Boy? And everybody else laughs, guys and girls, while I look around and say what’s a corsage? Nobody laughing. So Molly says, bless her soul, “Oh, Mitchell gave me a whole bouquet earlier,” not saying it was eight weeks earlier, and sweeps me out of the house, holding my arm tight. And it went downhill from there.
Not only could I not dance well, but I couldn’t get it through my thick head that doing so, even well, could possibly be somehow somewhere anytime enjoyable. Molly was all decked out, a satiny dress and curls in her hair and fancy shoes and a little stuff on her eyes, and I kept seeing her in a tee shirt and jeans, swinging my hand through the red sand of Utah.
We left early, but we couldn’t go home, look like failures, so we went for ice cream at the Manwaring Center, me trying to smile, make hah-hah about having three left feet and her saying, more like scolding, you’re just not trying hard enough, Mitchell. “You can’t just be a country bumpkin forever. There’s more to having fun than just the woods.” And me thinking but not saying: and that wasn’t it.
And we went on that way for a few weeks, trying real hard both of us, really wanting to love and hang on and touch and hold and make it work, but her slipping inexorably further and further away into her reality and me wondering where mine was. She begged for me to come along, assuming with great compassion the role of my tutor, in the same stroke assuming that her personal experience defined the only course of worth and rightness and value in the eyes of God, a path way above mere unenlightened mountain bumpkinhood.
Informed of the task, their help enlisted with all good intent, her roommates, all lifelong Mormon girls from Mormon ancestry, joined her in the education of Little Tree Boy, all thinking they were helping me out, nurturing me toward full bloom as a child of God. At least one of them, however, Jeannine, grasping it as her chance to treat me like a fool.
First of December, four weeks off the Grand Tour, Molly took me to a campus concert, saying this is what you need to be “exposed to,” four guys with matching Dumb and Dumber haircuts and corduroy jackets actually dancing while they sang, kicking their legs up in unison, a little “pop” orchestra in the pit behind them, anonymous, and me trying hard not to heave or leave after the second number, Molly real “disappointed” in my comments afterward.
So then I took her to one, bunch of barbed-wire and cockleburr longhairs out of Ronan, Montana doing some absolute kick-butt clap-your-hands bluegrass, Molly saying beforehand I’ve never heard of bluegrass, the whole genre of music. (Alison Krauss? Nickel Creek? Dan Tyminski? Come alive, girl!) But she loved it, we both leaving the concert (not a dance) with our hands so swollen from clapping along I thought mine were gonna pop.
But then it got personal.
Fat hands or not, she told me a couple days later my taste in music was not up to the Lord’s standard, look at the guys who played it, long hair and all. Hippies.
I told her, not all of them, look at Billy Corgan, he cut his, and she said never heard of him, but that wasn’t her point anyway. It was simply wrong. It wasn’t righteous music, and my full and appropriate conversion would require a purging of all the old ways, and an acceptance, which would soon blossom within me like a good seed, of a new standard of musical composition. Stuff with a lot of piano or organ, I reckoned; The Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing “This Land Is Your Land” instead of Woody Guthrie, who wrote it.
So I said what about the stuff I play on the guitar, I thought you liked my tunes? And she said, those are nice, some of them, but you’re still progressing toward what is truly right and proper.
I hung out alone with my Taylor that weekend and wrote Molly a long letter, handing it to her at her apartment door Sunday night. Then I stayed away all week, thinking to myself I’m running on just about empty. She handed me a letter of my own Thursday night. Had someone drive her up to my apartment, a smile at the doorway, but then a rapid retreat. The envelope was scented lightly with the stuff in her hair that just drove me into fits. I waited for night, then went out and sat in my Toaster to read it by frosty parking lot light.
It was nine pages. The first thing she wrote was oh baby I love you. And I thought heck of a time to bring that up. But she brought it up again and again, telling me how she was soaking her pillow with her tears—the girl who never cried—and so ashamed of how callous and arrogant she must seem, but she had no other idea of how to express her love except by, as I had recently accused her, mothering me, a role she had been forced to assume in her own home five years before. But I had taught her so much, given her so much courage and told her she was a princess, and could I forgive her and what do we do next?
So we tried again, one last Saturday afternoon just before the Christmas break, an aimless ride in my VW. But something was broken and we couldn’t find all the parts. I stopped on the “hill” above the Rexburg water tower and I told her I wanted to hold her, hold her real tight, for maybe a hundred years. But she said it scared her, I made her feel like she was burning up inside, like she couldn’t hold back what she really wanted to do next, and that would ruin both of our lives.
And so we looked at each other from 14 inches apart for what seemed like thirty years, running the movie forward and back, looking at the parts, the plot lines, the characters. And the longer we looked, the shorter the movie became, until it simply fizzled and went poof in front of our faces.
And that was that. Our story was over.
I drove down to New Mexico for Christmas break, but it was just Steve alone in the Bluebird, saying Rosey had left for college up to Cheney, Washington, and Lisa had just up and disappeared, not even telling him goodbye, maybe heading back to Oklahoma. Just gone. I bout choked on that, but what was I expecting?
We sat around for a day and half trying to talk, him really pissy and sour about my “Jesus Trip,” so I went down to Taos and shuffled around amongst the folks who had welcomed me to Mormonism. Ernie Begay, the Mormon branch president, insisted I come to his place for Christmas dinner, and then park the VW next to his little house and use their bathroom, so I did. The folks there in the little Mormon branch loved me and missed me and asked me all about Idaho, so I fed them the good stuff in the evenings, but just sat and stewed on the creek bank east of town during the day, staring off into the box elders and the pinyons. And sat and I stared and I wondered, what had gone wrong? Two loves, two lives, two eternities.
Early January I climbed back into the Toaster and waved goodbye, up through Denver and across Wyoming to Salt Lake City and then north to Rexburg.
Not two days back, a couple of fellas from upstairs knock at the door and say, we’ve heard you pick. Want to join a band? So I did, the three of us starting to jam in their apartment on a regular basis, then on the lawn out front as it started warning up, meaning high forties by April. Bluegrass. Two guitars and a banjo, Jared Purcell switching now and then to mandolin.
We called ourselves Captain Moroni and the Gadianton Band, Book of Mormon names that made everybody chuckle and say “cool!” Then we set a concert date for the last week of school, securing the main floor of the apartment complex’s rec center and continued to jam out on the lawn.
I dated a handful of other girls over the next two months, one right there in the apartment complex named Katie, a good looking brunette who told me first date that she’d just “been waiting” for me and Molly to tank. And I played guitar, oh I played guitar. Suddenly I’m on fire again, writing songs left and right, better stuff than I’d ever done, with new themes like finding God and looking forward with hope, with just a bit of lost-the-girl stuff thrown in for spice. I was hyped enough to tell Bob I wanted to play a concert, do a solo gig: find me a crowd. He said I’d have to audition for the Program Council, but he’d set it up.
So I went, I played (two of my own compositions, of course), and the Program Council (Bob recused himself) said interesting, but just not our type of music, we’re looking for a little different sound. And I said to the main guy, is that jacket you’re wearing corduroy? And he says, no, I think it’s nylon or something, why? And I went back to the apartment and wrote some more songs and practiced til my fingers bled and took Katie on another date, her looking pretty good, me wearing bandaids on my left hand. I had said, kind of sheepish, that we ought to take her car, as it wouldn’t look good the two of us out in my camper bus. She visibly shrugged, didn’t care, but finally agreed to let me drive her Corolla.
Afterward, in the apartment complex parking lot, nine-fifteen at night and the weather finally being reasonable, mid-April, she asked me to kiss her. Facing right up to me across the parking brake, wearing a satiny black dress that buttoned up the front—all the way, knee to neck. I said, you kidding? And she said, not at all, and maybe more than kissing. Which would get us both kicked right out of school at a Mormon college.
We actually sat there and discussed getting it on, me cold and calculating, adding it up, she saying man I been wanting to roll around with you for eight months, take me. And me telling Colin afterward, she scared me to death I never even gave her a kiss, and him saying Holy Hannah and Sweet Reeses Pieces I can’t even get a date!
I said, try Katie.
On Friday night, one week before the end of semester, we took the stage, really just the floor, in our world premier concert. It was me up front, the guy telling jokes and singing and getting the girls to smile and announcing some of my own tunes, the crowd all dancing and clapping and saying wow, even the good girls raised in little Mormon towns.
And me saying, take that, Ideeho.
Next morning, the last weekend of the school year, Molly calls and invites me to a “fireside,” what the Latter-day Saints call a Sunday night devotional talk when the speaker’s really good and they’re expecting a crowd. (The others they just say, wanna go hear some guy talk? Maybe there’s cookies.) She even said, I can be your date, if you’re interested.
I said sure, even escorted her to the car holding her elbow, Jeannine looking through the curtains. But the devotional talk had quite a bit more spirit and direction than did the companionship. Coming home, pulling into a parking stall, Molly said well we can always be friends, kind of tepidly hopeful. And I turned the car off, and looked at her. Straight on, the most beautiful green eyes I’d ever seen my reflection in. And I said I don’t see how.
And she started to speak, but then turned aside, lowering her head but never shedding a tear.
I said, “I wanted more than that, Molly,” and I didn’t mean sex. “I really wanted you to love me, to help me grow. Maybe even wait for me when I go on my mission,” which I was going to do. Finally I said, “I really loved you, Molly, and I meant every minute of it, don’t you ever doubt my sincerity. Tonight was honest, too, I really wondered. But I think we’ve gone as far as we can go. We’re just on different roads to heaven.”
She looked back up at me, finally turning to tears, and said “I meant it, too, Mick. I really loved you. I’ll never forget you.”
Then I said, “Molly, will you please just kiss me goodbye?”
But she never did.
And then it all ended. I hugged Colin and even Bob and the boys in the band and pointed the big fat snub nose of my Volkswagen toward New Mexico and went zoom, thinking, well here I go, all alone again.
But then I drove all the way to Texas, by way of Norman, Oklahoma.
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