I transferred to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah after two years abroad. Halfway through my sophomore year I was failing college and dead broke. I was as low as I had ever been. The varnish with its lustrous shine was off the Y. I was taking a cold discerning look at the school and its benefactor, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It was clearly difficult to ignore the level of bullshit I was standing in, but I was quietly inclined, indefinitely, to continue shoveling anyway, which I did with a certain degree of humility and terrible guilt. Mormonism, steeped in its miasma of pretentious mythology and structured elitism felt increasingly hollow and overly burdensome. Inside the seal of a sanctified bubble of self-confidence was an all-or-nothing adherence to building God’s kingdom–a phalanx corporate matrix of rules and weird doctrine and obsessive record keeping of ritualistic ordinances. The condition of individual value in the faith is predicated on worthiness–a most foul word to my mind and completely weaponized as spiritual abuse. My willful curiosity and intellectual acuity fueled a firestorm of doubt and disdain for a covenant I was born into but one I never would have made had the church shown all its cards. It was difficult to resolve the attraction and repulsion I felt in the faith–like facing a woman with perfect tits and shit breath it was a stifling mindfuck. A complex body of unsubstantiated spiritual assertions and lingering historical prejudices and sexual malfeasance–the chasm would only widen the more I read and the older I got. I began to openly acknowledge how impossible it would be, no matter how hard I tried, to ignore what was evident before me–this eternal relationship was not going to work out.
I felt a heaviness I had never known but I managed the burden by aptly sustaining a temporized cognitive dissonance. The threat of my growing spiritual existentialism was something I knew would require heavy reinforcement and perspective which I was not then prepared to fully summon. I needed more experience, more depth perception, more language, more of life. I certainly could not have articulated much of this to the extent I can now, but the perception of prescience was strongly there nonetheless and I recognized it. If there was a singular grace in all of this it was my natural proclivity for reading deep literature across a broad spectrum which served as blocker and tackler to the syrupy culture and niched indoctrination of a surface belief system. In essence my intellectualism was the proton-pump-inhibitor to the induced stomach acid derived from the often mind-numbing study of the standard works and general authority pronouncements of the church. If I were only required to read the Bible, I may never have questioned any of it, but The Book of Mormon, poorly written as it was, cheapened the Jesus I admired in the New Testament. Additionally, the Doctrine & Covenants read like a trail of postscripts and apologies from a polyandrous Joseph Smith just covering his tracks on his way to catching a bullet he may well have deserved. I would later find out that the Pearl of Great Price was an outright fraud which further implicates the odd account of Smith’s stone-in-hat translation of the Gold Plates.
I had the wizard’s curtain in my hands and I was ready to pull it back. For the first time in my life I was testing a searing counterbalance of contradiction. Much of this was subconscious, but I was making a choice to challenge the incongruity that was there. It was liberating and refreshing! At the same moment I was experiencing my first bout of depression.
****
The campus at BYU during my undergraduate tenure (1995 through 1997) was a chain link nightmare. It did not sync with the day-of-the-feast royal blue grapes I’d kept in distorted memory of Homecoming 1985 and bottled into a dreamy fermented elixir. In some ways that day felt like an old VHS recording I’d watched over and over again in my mind. My Dad–BA Communications, 1975– brought me to see Robbie Bosco surgically castrate the San Diego State Aztecs, 28-0. It was the year after I’d wept joyfully as the Cougs beat Michigan for the National Championship in the Holiday Bowl. Dad took me to the Wilkinson Center before the game for the most sumptuous breakfast I’d ever tasted. And after, to the Bookstore where I got a poster of linebacker Leon White sitting on a Mack Truck which I later hung above my bed next to Jim McMahon in Chicago Bear Blue and Danny Ainge in Boston Celtic Green. We strolled across the campus together, Dad pointing out places he’d gotten into the sort of trouble aspirant of every college Freshman. I was too young to understand the energy I was feeling, but I loved it! Dad was so handsome and animated that day–a man in his prime showcasing a place where life truly began for him. I made note of everything, particularly the pretty girls in tight royal blue and white t-shirts–oh how they bounced! I set my sights for arrival after I had grown a foot or two. And then suddenly I pressed the forward button on the VCR to advance the tape and there I was, ten years later failing as an Accounting Major on Accutane. The girls were still there but they weren’t smiling at me, and some marketing douche had convinced the school to orphan the iconic royal blue and white color scheme for dark navy, tan and black–WTF?!
One night after a bleak accounting class in the Tanner building I wandered the campus distraught and alone. I went to get some cash at an ATM machine outside of the Wilkinson Center. All I got was a receipt informing me I had insufficient funds. I was staring at a big goddamn hole in the ground where renovations for the Harold B. Lee Library had begun and remember thinking that even if the angel Moroni appeared to me at that miserable moment and called me to righteousness I would have told him to fuck off. I knew I was unexceptional and I was okay with that. I was enraged and disappointed; mostly with myself. I no longer cared about God’s plan of salvation and wondered if I ever did. I just wanted a different taste in my mouth. For a fleeting moment I considered packing it all up and heading to Fort Collins to chase Catholic girls at Colorado State. Instead, I already knew what I was going to do. I walked off campus and bought my first pack of Marlboro Reds and then drove my piece of shit car to an empty baseball diamond and sat alone at the center of the bleachers to smoke and read Winner Take Nothing by Ernest Hemingway.
The very next morning I entered the Jesse Knight Humanities Building (JKHB) and declared myself an English Major.
****
Literature, by nature, is subversive, rebellious, sexual, sensual, intimate, argumentative, challenging, plain, fucking honest, hard to discuss with insecure people, non-religious / agnostic, humorous–to the point of irreverent bucksnorting laughter, mighty, pornographic, depressing, addictive, sad beyond belief, torturous, laborious and long winded, suffrable, sensational, kind, curious, full of empathy, all heart, complete nonsense, imagined and real, fiction and nonfiction, grammatically correct and free-forming, history and memoir and essay and poem and short story and novella and novel, a view of paradise and all of hell, discordant and impetuous, presumptive, assumptive, maddening and insecure, eloquent, elegant, silly and petty, short and long and in between, serious and frivolous, poetry and prose, boisterous, harsh, male and female, driven by penis and manipulated by vagina, defecatory, mastaboratory, unrequited love, consummate and consummated, forceful, thoughtful, disrespectful and mocking, insightful, equable, non-discriminatory and prejudiced, faithless and atheist, christian and muslim and jewish and humanist and blasphemous, full of rumour and speculation and ideology and philosophy, skeptical, measured and unfettered, passionate, lustful, circumspect, in full possession of the entire spectral thrust of life and living and dying and death and sickness and health and worry and doubt and anger and conflict and resolution, resurrection and rebirth, cynical, satiric, intolerant, sober and drunk, ebullient, murderous, vast and miraculous, sublime and usually far more enjoyable and informative than scripture.
****
I pulled Ernest Hemingway’s Winner Take Nothing from my shelf last week and held it in my lap for a long time–didn’t even open it, just looked long and hard at the image on its black and anemic-yellow dust jacket. I know the book well, it has been a good traveler with me; the stories inside are plain, hard as life, written in sentences that land like gut punches. The stark setting on the cover pulls me in and I am there with it, standing near a wooden porch looking outward beyond a two-log cow fence over a field of tall grass under the hot high noon sun as an old Hudson kicks up a cloud of dust from a road unseen. Two birds–probably hawks hunting field mice–hover open-winged in the sky where sailing clouds hang like boats on a solar drenched sea out to a line of meandering foothills along the horizon. There is nothing remarkable in the image but it is the sense of movement that reminds me that this hour has already passed, that what was there can never be again. I pulled it up and looked closer. I remained with it for a moment, just sitting in the chair with the weight of the book in my hands. It was clear to me that the image has nothing to do with what it shows and everything to do with what it can’t. After a while I opened the book and turned to A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and began to read.
****
I’ve thought long and hard over the last several weeks about BYU. I don’t know why. I don’t really remember much about it. There are those who I knew, and who knew me, while we were there together, that may way well have no idea what I was really experiencing and their interpretation of my time in Provo would be valid, but it is only a sliver of a moving video image of a younger man coming to terms with the contradiction of his own willful viewpoint. I was not happy at Brigham Young. If I were to describe my time there I would say it bordered on banal misery. As a boy I had put so much emphasis on the mythology of the school and its front porch to eternity that I was, in hindsight, guaranteed to be terribly disappointed. I hesitate to allow for the previous sentence if only because it may sound as if I had unrealistic expectations. In truth, I really didn’t. In fact, I had none at all. I knew by the time I arrived that I was indeed unexceptional and that the emphasis of my presumption for BYU, which I had harbored since I was a boy with posters of glory on his walls, was entirely my own creation. I was not angry at the school and I did not find anyone else there loathsome or harboring ill motives toward me. For the most part it was and shall always remain a clean, well-lighted place. Its indoctrinated religious foundation was quaint even at its most malignant and never interfered with the natural glide path I chose as an English Major to see myself as quickly through it all as possible. From the moment I got there I had only one intent, to get the hell out as quickly as I could and get on with life. There is no one to blame and no fault to be given, it was just a place I hustled through and aside from two or three girls I really, deeply thought I loved and wished that I had been more confident in letting them know that, I got exactly what I wanted while I was there and prepared my literary lens for a very long shot in life.
I graduated from the School of Humanities with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature and a Minor in Dutch/Flemish in December, 1997. My cumulative GPA was 2.86. I didn’t attend the ceremony–I just had the school mail my diploma. What I am most proud of is my durability. I had so terribly tanked my pristine GPA from freshman year after returning from two years in Europe that the solid grades I received once I put myself in my true milieu as a literature major only marginally redeemed the damage done. There would be no academic options for me after BYU and I knew it. I did later receive a Masters degree from Ball State University of which I am immensely proud, but I know deep in my heart the vast talent and potential I had while at BYU that was never able to find its place and flourish–nobody gave a damn. That is entirely on me and no one else; I hold no blame for the school, its silly church or any of my professors. I was a poor kid who had no connections. My truest friends were the books I read in the lonely corners of the library basement of the HBLL and the five dudes I lived with in a little blue house off campus at 694 N. 100 West as well as every girl I worked alongside as a waiter at Magleby’s–I loved every one of them with all my heart. I was always earnest and kind in what I attempted and largely kept to myself and the papers I poorly wrote. I had no sense for what would come after BYU other than a confidence of self reminding me of my ability to figure it out as I went along. I did what most English Majors with poor grades do after college, I got into sales to make money for the Harvard MBAs sitting behind their self-important and largely undeserved Corporate Senior Vice President desks while I kept getting laid off and moved out. Those important people of pedigree can keep the change.
If there is a heaven after this life then I will play 2nd Base for the Dodgers in the springs and summers of my forever existence and in the off seasons I will earn a PhD in English Literature from The University of Chicago where Norman Maclean once taught. Only now he will be alive and I will ask him, with great respect, to be my advisor. Upon receiving that much wished for doctorate which I will never be invited to get in this life, I will be offered a position to teach literature to innumerable souls who have lost their way and I will reignite the human fire so deeply imbedded inside all of us, but which, for them, has sadly been extinguished. I’m already working on that curriculum–its reading list is profound.
There is but one more wish in the cornfield for me. That when this life is over I may continue, unobstructed, to be a writer, only just. Maybe God Himself will read one of my books.
After all else, I am only just passing through. Aren’t we all? I am an English Major.
RCS
19 July, 2020