Chapter 8
In the quiet of the morning light, I snuck up on Great Salt Lake from the southwest. Surrounded by mountains, it was different from Tahoe in that the low-lying desert hillsides around it were less rich and more barren than the hillsides of the Sierras. As I eased into the city of the great Mormon, Joseph Smith, I saw that both Declan and Lucas still slept soundly. We had been traveling for five days now. It was the 29th day of August.
The great surreal salt crystal city was just as I had remembered it from my trip there in June of 1983 except that the June snow on the surrounding Wasatch Mountains was long gone. It had that same feel to it of robotic perfection that it had years before. As we entered her gates, I drove by her giant white Mormon Temple, then by the proud statue of Brigham Young and the Miracle of the Gulls Monument (two big bronze seagulls atop of a tall pole) and eventually pulled up close to the Art Center which was right across the street from the Marriott (where I had stayed before). After I parked, the guys awoke, and we all ran free from the car, working our legs again, taking some of our blankets with us to sleep on the green lush Art Center lawn. It was daylight now, and we didn’t care what anyone thought of us; we were anonymous in this spotless city of Barbie and Ken; we were homeless and uninhibited. Restless and unable to sleep, I got up from the lawn after a while and headed over to walk the nearby mall by myself. I wandered the outside shops for about an hour watching the passing perfect blond haircut smiling faces. With every face that passed, I took the dark comfort of knowing that not a single being in the whole city and for hundreds of miles in every direction, save for the two transients asleep on the lawn, recognized me.
When I got back to my friends in the afternoon, we all wandered a few blocks toward the great Mormon theme park to take in the traditional Mormon tour. On our tour, we tried to grasp this Mormon version of Christianity that they tried so hard to sell to us. Same as the Scientologist guy with his two big Dalmatian dogs hanging around the hotel lobby set back in Los Angeles trying to talk us into his religion. I had read The Martian Chronicles and thought to myself again after the tour that everybody knows there isn’t anyone living on Mars . . . It was just a good story. But that all aside, the architecture of the wooden tabernacle and the surrounding buildings was truly incredible; I was impressed with the majestic granite temple, the tight, clean façades, and the whole concept of what human minds that are driven by sheer faith can ultimately accomplish. On the tour, we had been lined up and drawn into a moving conveyor belt like it was a ride at Disneyland. There was no turning back or getting off of this ride. It was a story full of entertainment, but after it all was told, a story that somehow I could never truly believe.
“Beware of the cult!” the people said back in Southern California.
Raised Irish Catholic by a catechism passed down through generations of laborers and centuries of poor farmers tilling the soil of Ballynahown, I constantly wrestled with my own faith. What was truth and what was story? As a child, I questioned my father Frank’s wisdom all of the time. Did Jonah really live in the belly of a whale? But how? And how, genetically speaking, could Adam and Eve ever have propagated the entire human race? That would mean brothers marrying sisters, wouldn’t it? My own father chided that someday, if ever I might be so lucky, I would be humbled at the feet of Jesus Christ himself in the great expanses of purgatory and heaven, repenting for my sin. “How dare you talk that way, Mike!” And we argued on and on about this very thing called “faith” for many of my teenage years.
It wasn’t always like this. I had started out at a very early age convinced that God, in fact, did exist; convinced because I heard him all the time talking to us above our heads when we went to weekly Mass.
When I was five years old, we attended Saint Matthews Church with the eleven-fifteen being the most popular Sunday Mass. So many people went to that one service that the church had to have simultaneous services in both its upstairs and downstairs halls. The larger Mass was held in the huge glorious upstairs main church, and the spillover Mass was held below in the lower ceilinged church hall. Every week, Frank, my father, parked on the side street in the rear of the church, and we would attend the downstairs service. As regimented as Catholic Masses always were, the people in both halls stood, kneeled, and sat at approximately the same time as the gospel was read. We all stood in unison as one giant body when the priest sang “Glory to God in the highest!” with the altar boys ringing their brass rows of bells during the priests’ laments.
It was there in the downstairs hall that I first heard those magnificent rumblings of thunder above my head, unbeknownst to me at the time that it was the sound of the people rising to their feet in the main church above us, precisely at the time that both priests in both Masses uttered the words “Praise be to God!” For the longest time I had always believed those sounds to be none other than the acknowledging voice of God himself, acknowledging all of us, thanking us for being there, as we stood up to sing and to praise him. It was him! I was so, so sure it was him!
But sadly, the day came when I asked my father about this, and he chuckled and told me that the sound was not God, but merely all of the people upstairs standing up or sitting down.
“If God was that vocal, then, of course, everybody would believe in him!” Frank said to me.
“But why wouldn’t God want everybody to believe in him?”
“Because we need to have faith first in order to be saved,” Frank would say.
I wished after that day that my father had never told me the truth. It was easier to believe in God when he made noise. How would anyone ever be able to debate the existence of God if he always made noise? But after that day, God was silent.
On our Mormon tour, a beautiful Barbie Doll talked to us from her side of the partitioned conveyer belt. She told us that their “guy” was the same guy as our guy, but he had come over to the Americas after he died on the cross in Jerusalem. I wondered then why the Native Americans didn’t tell Miles Standish about this occurrence. And she told us how Joseph Smith found these golden plates in the ground in upstate New York, but they got lost. If these golden plates were so sacred, why didn’t he take better care of them, I wondered. Why are religions always losing their sacred things? Was it God’s way of testing our faith? There were cobblestones on the streets of Boston older than Joseph Smith’s golden plates. I just couldn’t buy this whole “golden plates” story and Jesus traveling through the Americas, especially with all of the early American colonists’ accounts that never mentioned this. The Native American spoken word stories would have surely included them.
“People ask that question a lot, the plates were returned to the Angel Moroni,” Barbie said to me. I saw in her kind blue eyes that her blind faith was un-rock-able. She had been weathered by that question from many of us on the other side of the conveyor belt, but she would never waiver, because defection was so rare; she would never, ever, cross over to the moving sidewalk of the doubters; she would never question her own faith the way that so many Catholics had questioned theirs.
The tour was abruptly over. We moved on down that exit walkway while the Angel Moroni and Joseph Smith sat in some little room in all of Salt Lake City’s collective mind working Joseph Smith’s seer stone inside a grand magician’s hat deciphering those invisible golden plates.
Leaving the building, we found a phone booth on the squeaky clean street, and Declan tried calling a phony number that he had come across on one of the mall bulletin boards. It was for some Salt Lake City movie production job. It was a wrong number; the person on the other end had no idea what he was talking about. It was nothing more than an illusion according to Lucas, “Just more golden plates.” Lucas then called our old roommate Jesse back in Huntington Beach to check on the things we had left behind. Jesse told him that he had weighed all of our packed up boxes that had been left at Ingrid’s entryway for UPS to pick up, just as we had instructed. He didn’t know why UPS didn’t pick them up unless they were waiting for the one hundred forty-eight dollar payment first. We grabbed workout clothes from the parked car and settled on a local gym to get a quick workout in before moving on. Talking to the desk agent up at the front of the gym, we posed as prospective members and Declan convinced the guy to let us try the place out. We got in a pretty good bench press workout, then showered, shaved, and quietly slipped by the front desk while the attendant was stacking towels. He never got our signatures.
Lucas loaded his KROQ mixer tape into the Fairlane tape deck, and we were fit to drive again, saying good-bye to the clean temple skyline architecture dwarfed by the creviced Wasatch Range.
When we got just south of the city, driven by mad impulse, Declan suddenly veered off the road after seeing signs for a closed copper mine and tried to find it. But we found no access to it without our having to get out of the car to look for it, so we abandoned that idea immediately. Declan was crazy again, and he headed west on another small road so he could swim in the Great Salt Lake, but when we got there, the dirty water on the flooded shoreline made this idea terribly undesirable. Even Declan decided not to swim in it. I had remembered seeing a picture of the Great Salt Lake in some old school textbook with clean-cut Mormon people from the fifties floating in it so effortlessly. Maybe it had just been cleaner in the fifties, I thought. We stopped at a small convenience store and picked up some groceries before we finally headed south on Interstate 15.
Declan wrote out a check in the Fairlane to UPS and sent the check to Ingrid special delivery from a post office we found a few miles away in Midvale. I mailed the Norman Rockwell picture book to Spooner and Bethany from Midvale too. Declan chuckled as he watched me stuff the large illustrated book into a post office padded envelope as best as I could. It wasn’t the greatest wedding gift wrap after all.
I thought about Colette frequently. I was fighting off sleep and in and out of five-minute naps on the road; my head bobbed in the backseat. Languid and listless, my legs hurt from the run in San Jose two days before. I felt the hard pain of shin splints in my tibia bones. We were soon screaming southeast bound on Interstate 6 toward Price. I caught my crazy receding hairline in the rearview mirror once, the moving sun hit it, and I painfully realized that I looked balder than ever before. This was such a fleeting trip, this whole trip called life, and all of a sudden, I was sad again. The disappearing hairline had followed me from mirror to mirror over the last four years, and it always brought on the sadness. I dreamt of having hair again; I dreamt that I had long hair, lots of it; I dreamt of patches and patches of it falling and caking up Mary’s shower drain in San Pablo. I was suddenly falling off of a cliff. I caught myself with a quick gasp of breath. It was a quick flash in the ever-encroaching night of life, and then I was awake again and looked out the tempered glass window of our moving car.
On my left I began to notice how our country seemed to be getting more mountainous as we pushed the eastern border of the Utah state and the foothills of the mighty Rockies. There were dusk-blown silhouettes of fading purple ridges that traveled the road beside us as the day now turned to night and the night turned to the darkness that I was always so afraid of.
Later on, Declan got pulled over going sixty-five miles per hour on Interstate 6. We sat on the shoulder, me in the passenger seat next to him, and I watched the trooper slowly strut up toward us in my side mirror. I frantically kicked at the empty beer cans at my feet with the back end of my heels trying to bury them under the bench seat. The aluminum cylinders crushed as they met resistance against the seat. Crack! I hesitated to move my feet lest one might come clanging back. I cranked down the window to let the officer lean in.
“Can you get out of the car, young man,” the officer pointed at Declan. “Can I see your license and registration?”
“Mike, can you look in the glove compartment for the registration?” Declan called to me from outside the car, crouching to the window and reaching toward the jumble of papers I now held in my nervous hands.
“Luke!, I can’t find the registration. Where is the registration?” I called back to Lucas who was asleep in the back, but Lucas wouldn’t wake up at first.
“There it is.” Declan pulled it from the stack of paper. But the name on the piece of paper wasn’t Lucas’s. It was the old lady’s that he had bought the car off of.
“That’s not it.” Lucas was awake now and reached to his wallet to pull out a temporary registration that was issued to him. Everything checked out with the temporary registration. Never noticing the crushed cans that stay jammed at my heels, never saying a word to us about the crazy surfboard atop the vehicle, the trooper issued Declan a warning. “Son, you need to realize that the speed limit is fifty-five all over the U.S.”
I thought of Kerouac’s infamous Dean Moriarty and that beautiful Hudson going back and forth between Virginia and New York and Dean getting pulled over and arrested for breaking the speed limit. We were transients with no ties to anyplace now, crisscrossing America sort of the same way that Kerouac had done forty years before, without a worry in the world. But the alcohol abuse could overtake you like a thief in the night; there had to be a balance. I didn’t want to die alone at forty years old on the side of the railroad tracks in Mexico, all overdosed on drugs and overexposed to the elements, dead from absolute kidney failure.
Roy Buchanan left his talent on the stage at the Paradise Beach Casino before he fell off that night. Years later, he hung himself in a Pennsylvania jail cell. Poor guy constantly walked the tightrope of genius and insanity at the end of his life. Was it the genius that took him up to the edge? Or was it the insanity? When do you know where to catch yourself before you fall off of the stage? And Salinger wasn’t even in the rye anymore. He was a recluse in New Hampshire and didn’t want to talk to anyone. How was anyone ever going to figure out genius on their own? We needed them around.
Maybe about an hour later, Declan pulled over for all of us to sleep. We would try to make Colorado tomorrow. The banana nut bread that Mary had given us was finished. We were still hungry but had nowhere to go. We were near Price, Utah. Declan decided to sleep outside a few feet off the shoulder of the road with a blanket he pulled from the back of the car. Lucas slept on the warm hood of the Fairlane out in another beautiful open star-loaded night, and I had the whole backseat to myself again.