The World’s Strongest Librarian

  When I turned sixteen, Kellie, a pretty girl in my ward, agreed to go on a date with me. Since Elko, Nevada, wasn’t exactly bursting with nightlife opportunities for kids—casinos and brothels being out of the question—I took her to see Mrs. Doubtfire. I was excited, but also terrified by what might happen. My fantasies and church teachings had taught me to think that an orgy was always right around the corner, and that I might very well be hell-bound by morning. I also wanted to be irresistible and smooth, and my increasingly random tics made it harder to predict how my body would behave.

  “Remember who you are,” said my mom. “Be a gentleman.”

  I picked Kellie up in my tiny Honda Civic hatchback—I was already six feet seven and I suspected that my parents bought this car hoping it would serve as a chastity belt with good gas mileage. I’d tucked a coil of fuel tubing—a circle of rubbery hose—inside the pocket of my dad’s old leather jacket, which he’d agreed to let me wear even though it was June. My latest tic was to bite my lips, tongue, and the inside of my cheeks repeatedly. So my plan was to secretly slip the rubber tubing into my mouth and bite down on it if the tic showed up. I was hoping that I wouldn’t need it, but if necessary, I could probably chomp away in the darkened theater without Kellie noticing, unless we got down to making out as soon as the previews started.

  The biting tics lay dormant. Instead, I yipped and yapped and hooted. Luckily, most Robin Williams movies are punctuated by deafening trumpet blasts and madcap soundtracks, so if Kellie noticed (I’m sure she did), she didn’t say anything. But I needed her to say something about something.

  “This is really funny,” I said, nodding at the movie. It wasn’t.

  “I know!” she whispered. She hadn’t laughed once. But that’s Robin Williams for you. The zanier he got, the less we smiled. We had that much in common, at least.

  My fantasized make-out session never materialized. While our shoulders occasionally touched during the movie, that was it. I was inexplicably operating at half-capacity wittiness. If Kellie knew I was struggling, she gave no sign, but I knew the date was a dud. As I drove out of her driveway, an involuntary scream burst out of me, much louder than anything I’d done in the theater.

  My mom was waiting up for me. “Did you have fun?”

  “Yes,” I lied. My honor was still intact, but I was too exhausted and frightened about the future to care.

  “Did you put the moves on her?” Dad asked. “The moves are in your blood.”

  “Frank!” Mom said.

  “Because if you need to learn the ropes, I can teach you. I am wise in this way. Ask your mother.”

  “No,” I said.

  As I lay in bed, tossing and turning with that particular agony known only to lusty young boys after an evening that goes nowhere, I thought about the Plan. Believing in the Plan meant that I had Tourette’s by design. I didn’t want to saddle anyone else with it in a partnership, but I was supposed to find someone to marry. This meant that someone else’s Plan was to marry a guy with worsening Tourette’s and bear his burdens.

  My date with Kellie was a dud and a fluke. When I tried to talk to girls—and I failed to try most of the time—I usually wound up talking about myself. “Hi, I’m Josh, I’ve got this weird thing so you might see this—” The girls would look at me expectantly. These were inevitably the times when my tics wouldn’t emerge, so my opening line was to tell someone that I had a disorder that resulted in no symptoms. Blah. Maybe my dad did need to teach me the ropes.

  It was 1994 and Nirvana had released the album Nevermind. Thrift stores in Elko filled with young men trading in their MC Hammer pants and vying for used, ragged sweaters and threadbare pants. I didn’t know who Kurt Cobain was when I borrowed a basketball teammate’s CD player during a trip and put those headphones on. By the time we got back to Elko I knew the words to every song. Or, I knew what I thought the words were. It was silly to think that the howling and unintelligible and nonsensical lyrics and the screaming feedback of the guitars had been written for me, but that’s how it felt. The music sounded like I felt. It wasn’t that I was angry, or disenfranchised, or that I hated my life, or that I really had anything to complain about. But I felt…more aggressive.

  I thought I’d been interested in girls before, but by the time the basketball season ended, I was gripped by a mania that nearly tore me in half. One day at school I had my road to Damascus moment: Every other girl was wearing a Nirvana shirt.

  That night at dinner I said, “My tics were really bad today.” This always killed the conversation. Not that it stopped me from saying it. I could neutralize any and all small talk that wasn’t related to or involving me. “I want to try something with music.”

  “What do you mean? You mean besides piano?” Dad asked. I’d started piano lessons when I was five, and I was still taking them. Piano had given me good posture, but I’d never heard a girl say, “Why can’t I just find a boy with suitable scapular alignment?”

  “I think I want to learn how to play the guitar. I think it looks fun and I think it would help me.”

  “Electric or acoustic?” said my dad.

  I pictured the girls in the Nirvana shirts. “Electric.”

  “Fine,” Dad said. “I’ll take you over to Salt Lake and we’ll go to Wagstaff. Have you ever been there? Tons of guitars.”

  “Really?”

  “If you think it will help, then yes, really,” said my dad.

  My mom couldn’t argue with that, but she was still trying to figure out what my angle was.

  “Girls love guitars,” said my dad. “You love guitars,” he said, pointing at my mom.

  “Don’t tell me what I love, you oaf.”

  We left for Salt Lake City the next weekend, as promised. We rose early and had breakfast at JR’s, a restaurant inside one of the casinos. Even at seven in the morning, the cacophony of people losing money served as background music. “When we moved here, your mom and I used to come down here and play the slots,” Dad said while we waited for our food.

  The thought of my mom playing the slot machines was as alien as the thought of her pole dancing. This was fascinating, and not just because Mormons don’t gamble. With the aim of being good examples for us kids, my parents kept their guard up fairly well, she better than he. But occasionally I’d see glimpses of the kids they had been, exhibits of the past, usually offered as evidence by one parent as a mild, good-natured indictment against the other. What else had they done that I didn’t know about? What else might they still be doing that I didn’t know about?

  I looked into the casino. One row of slots was taken by a row of elderly women whose blue hair looked psychedelic under the garish lights. One of them wore a tight black glove on her slot-pulling hand to keep it rust-free. They sold these gloves at many shops in Elko, including the convenience stores. They were usually on the counter with the impulse buys. Like the scant red panties bundled into the shape of a rose.

  “Did you really play the slots?” I asked.

  “Just a little bit,” he said. “Just for fun. We wouldn’t do it now. Your mom definitely wouldn’t. Hey, look at her!” He had noticed the lady with the glove.

  “Was it because you don’t have enough money to gamble now or because you’re trying to be good?”

  Dad laughed. “We definitely had less money back then, but it’s both. It’s a dumb habit and it’s even worse when people get addicted. Do you think she’s addicted?” Then he nodded and winked at the lady with the glove as she walked by. “Oh yeah, she’s got to have it.” We finished breakfast, got in the truck, and left Elko.

  Half an hour into the drive I pulled a paperback out of my jacket pocket and started reading. My dad said, “What’s your book about? Looks pretty spicy.”

  I closed it and wondered what to say. I’d started reading fantasy a couple of years earlier. I held a copy of Piers Anthony’s And Eternity, from the Incarnations of Immortality series. Each book told the story of a mortal who replaces one of the Incar
nations: Fate, War, Time, Death, Nature, Evil…and Good. And Eternity was about how the other Incarnations decide that God has been negligent and must be replaced. But that hadn’t caught my dad’s attention. The cover of And Eternity shows two women standing on clouds in a ray of light, arms outstretched in a pose of worship. Sprawled in front of them is a young, black-haired woman toying with a necklace. She is wearing thigh-high black nylons, a black tank top, and is lying turned to the side, apparently looking at my dad.

  “Well, this series is about these incarnations—they’re actually called ‘offices,’ like the Devil would have his own office, but his incarnation is called Evil, and—”

  “Who’s she?” Dad interrupted, pointing at the girl in the thigh-highs. I couldn’t tell him that it was looking like she’d be the one to replace God, so I said, “Never mind, it’s dumb. I know.”

  He laughed. “Just because it’s dumb doesn’t mean you can’t like it.” He gestured at the landscape. “Isn’t the real world interesting enough for you?” We were driving through an interminable expanse of sagebrush and flatness. At its most vibrant, sagebrush looks like a bouquet of flowers that has been dropped in a mud puddle. “Fascinating,” I said.

  Once we got to Wagstaff Music, I wandered the aisles, not knowing the differences between the guitars, and checking out the price tags. Occasionally I’d put a finger out and touch a glossy finish, or pluck a string. I furrowed my brow, trying to look like a discriminating shopper. I even picked up one guitar and held it out with the neck pointing away from me. I squinted one eye and looked down the neck as if I was gauging something.

  My dad elbowed me in the side and hissed. “Sssss!” He pointed across the room with his lips, where a kid was playing a guitar with his eyes closed. He swayed and nodded his head as his facial expressions changed. He’d be as blank as a zombie, then as concerned as a parent whose toddler is wandering toward the road. He was playing something heavily distorted and heavily awesome. My dad closed his own eyes and swayed in a passable, but less awesome imitation of the guitarist.

  The kid was wearing a Nirvana shirt.

  His guitar was black with a white pick guard and a light brown fret board. What if he buys that guitar? That’s my guitar.

  “May I help you gentlemen?” a voice asked.

  I shook the sales clerk’s hand and pointed to where the kid was…putting down the black guitar! “How much is that one?”

  “The Peavey Predator, huh?”

  All told, the guitar and amplifier, a beginner’s guide, plus a strap, four picks, and a cord, cost my dad $250. I hugged him in the parking lot. We drove to my aunt Kathy’s house and stayed the night. I opened my instruction book on the bedspread and plugged the guitar into the amp. I raked the pick along the strings and experimented with the settings on the amplifier for most of the night. When my dad banged on the ceiling above me I unplugged and kept noodling around.

  I soon learned that when I played the fierce Peavey Predator, I didn’t have tics. I could practice for eight hours in one day and banish Misty. I quickly started a band with some friends, the horribly named Broken Rainbow. We played at one battle of the bands (we didn’t win), in our garages (we won, the neighbors lost), and senior prom the next year. To my mom’s extreme dismay, soon I was drawn to heavier, more aggressive music. Nirvana was extreme in the beginning, but its effect wore off. I needed more. The most extreme music I ever got into was the band Slayer. I had Slayer T-shirts, all the albums, and I talked about the band with a focus bordering on autism. I talked about the band so much that I was given the nickname “Slaytan,” a mash-up of Slayer and Satan. I thought I could get away with having it stitched onto my basketball sweatshirt. I somehow forgot that my mom did my laundry.

  “Are you kidding me?” she said, holding the shirt up to my face. I couldn’t believe it, but that was when I noticed that it was spelled wrong. S-L-A-Y-T-O-N. That was my escape hatch. “It’s the name of a band,” I said. She folded her arms across her chest and squinted at me. “You don’t say?”

  “Mom! You don’t spell Satan with an o!”

  “You don’t say….”

  We didn’t talk about it again.

  As much as I loved my guitar, the girls weren’t coming around. “Like bees to a hive,” my dad had said. But no.

  Then Jennie came to seminary one morning. Nothing like meeting the woman of your dreams in church to squelch your teenage dreams of debauchery. She was a year younger than I was, about five-ten, and in my mind, absolutely ravishing. I watched her as the teacher droned on, something unimportant about the Plan of Salvation and my very own destiny. I knew what my destiny was. I knew where it was too. It was seated three chairs down and was wearing a skirt. But how was I going to meet Jennie? No, scratch that. I met her the same day everyone else did—the teacher introduced her and we all said hi and introduced ourselves. Alas, I didn’t say “hi” in a way that caused her to fall at my feet. But then! Salvation.

  That first year with the band, Steve—our drummer—and I improved at our instruments. My other two friends, the bass player and an additional guitarist, were great at jumping around, but they were…uninspired musicians. Steve and I had talked about adding another guitarist, but anyone who played was already in a rival band.

  Jennie’s brother was Steve’s age, and even though he was three years younger, he was already better at the guitar than I would ever be. He was incredible, a very special musician. Steve introduced us and soon I was jumping around in Jennie’s garage every afternoon. From there it was a short trip upstairs to her room to woo and flirt. A month later I took her to the high school Christmas dance and kissed her for the first time. We were so dizzy and stupid and drunk on each other after that night that I probably wouldn’t have ever graduated from high school if it hadn’t been so easy.

  Misty was jealous. Every time I was around Jennie, my tics got worse. I gave her my standard script, but I was nervous:

  Yeah, it’s called Tourette Syndrome. If you’ve ever seen that movie What About Bob? you’ve probably heard of it. It makes me move and make noises. I’ve got too much dopamine in my brain. It sort of overflows and signals get sent to my body that tell it to do things that I’m not consciously wanting it to do. Sorry if it annoys you. It annoys me too.

  One night while we watched TV, I yelped and clacked my teeth together over my tongue. “Ouch!”

  “What happened?” Jennie asked.

  “Bit my tongue.” I winced and moved my jaw around and hoped that she would want to kiss it better. Instead, she smiled, took off one of her shoes and said, “Here, you should bite down on this.”

  My first reaction was anger. How dare she laugh at this! But then I laughed. Jennie had no inclination to coddle me about this. I think she saw that it was more of a hassle for me than a burden. She waved the shoe in my face. “I just like the idea of you walking around with a shoe hanging out of your mouth. I think it would be…most dashing.”

  “Most dashing, huh?”

  “Most dashing.”

  My mom thought we were getting too serious. The church encourages group dating. Pairing off is seen as bad news, with good reason. Leave four kids alone who are trying to be good and it’s unlikely that an orgy will break out. Leave them unsupervised and in pairs and who knows? Our parents were oblivious and trusting. “Are you sure you guys can be good?” my mom asked when I told her that I was sleeping over at Jennie’s house, again.

  “Oh yeah. I’m sure.” Her parents actually let me sleep in Jennie’s room! We couldn’t believe what we were getting away with! After that first kiss we slowly grew bolder, needier. It took a while, though. We were tentative and felt guilty sometimes, but we couldn’t resist going further forever. As long as we told her parents we were being good, we could roll around and dry hump the sun up every weekend. We never had sex, and we knew that we wouldn’t unless we were married. We drove each other crazy and took things to a point that would have caused most people to say “And you didn’t? How?”


  How? Because the church was there in the background. No matter how much fun we had, there was always an unspoken guilt. And it would have meant that I couldn’t serve a mission on schedule when I turned nineteen.

  We were walking around Spring Creek’s disgusting, leech-filled, moss-choked marina in the spring of 1996 when I said, “When do you think we should get married?” We were about four months into our relationship. We were “in love” with that crazed certainty that only headstrong teenagers seem to be capable of.

  Jennie cocked an eyebrow. “You want to marry me, huh? Why?”

  “You know why,” I said, kissing her in a way that, in my head, was very smooth. “Because I love you.” We threw “I love you” around like someone would murder us if we stopped.

  “Then we’ll get married when you get back.”

  “Back?”

  “From your mission.” Shrieking children jumped off the dock, then emerged from the water shrieking even louder as they saw the leeches clinging to their clammy skin.

  I had avoided this conversation. I wanted to keep avoiding it. “So I have to go, huh?”

  “You do if you want me. That’s how it works.” I could talk Jennie into just about anything, but not this. And I didn’t want her to backtrack on her beliefs. And her parents wouldn’t want her to marry me if I didn’t serve a mission. My parents wouldn’t either. When a young man of mission age didn’t go, there was always a reason. Either he didn’t believe or he had sinned and his mission was delayed as he sorted out the repentance process. The process essentially entailed confessing to your bishop and then waiting for a year while remaining in good standing. I wouldn’t say that a church ward has more gossipers in it than other groups of similar size, but there were plenty. Worthy young men served missions. Unworthy young men stayed home and set the gossip’s tongues ablaze.

  “Okay. If that’s how it works,” I said. Jennie and I hadn’t talked about the church much. Doing so would have called attention to our delicious nighttime activities, which had no premarital justification. I couldn’t say, “Bishop, look, I know the church says we can’t treat each other like jungle gyms just yet, but biology and evolution are telling my cells that we should breed. Or at least go through the motions as often as possible.” But now I’d brought up the question and couldn’t take it back.