(SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, 10/14/05)

These Mormon boys had me more drunk than I’d been in years, and I watched as more and more trickled into Aaron’s nondescript condo, entering unannounced and helping themselves to the liquor.  They almost all wore button down shirts and baseball hats turned to the side.  Someone turned on an Xbox game with multiple first-person perspectives, and then everyone was hunting each other.  Still, they all seemed perfectly capable of carrying on a conversation, and I was learning a lot about Mormon life.  Forget the myriad illusions shattered by Aaron and his friends in the last half hour, I was mostly taken with tithe, a practice I’d somehow never heard of.

“Ten percent of the family income goes to the church or you’re out,” Aaron declared, feverishly manipulating the controller in his hand.  ”All religions have it, but Mormons are super strict abou— BITCH!” he suddenly interrupted himself, addressing a fellow player who’d shot him.  ”You’re fucking dead, dude.”

“But all that money goes to people who need it,” another friend added, eyes glued to the screen.  “I know a bunch of people who did their two year calling when they were nineteen, got married at twenty-one, and then were divorced by twenty-two.  Without the church tithe, they’d have been on their asses.”  A consensus of nods spread across the room. 

“Twenty-two and divorced?” I asked.

“Dude,” Aaron said.  “My last girlfriend was twenty-two and she’d already been divorced.  It’s not uncommon.”

Later, I started to explain my tour to a couple of the guys.  The video game had ended and the news was on.  A headline announced that a woman had just given birth to her sixteenth child, and the room erupted into a chorus of cheers and guffaws.  Everyone’s attention, even in my corner of the room, went to the story, and I felt suddenly embarrassed by the fact that I’d been talking about America 88x50; it seemed so out-of-place now.  I was almost grateful to have been interrupted.  I wouldn’t have to finish.

——-

Aaron was an entrepreneur of sorts, facilitating music lessons throughout Salt Lake City through his website and cell phone, which sang all night from the coffee table, the calls split evenly between music teachers, music students, their parents, and Aaron’s friends.  I wasn’t even positive if his business was affiliated with the music school his parents ran back in Park City where I would play the next day.  It didn’t really matter.  I’d been grandfathered into a night of barhopping.  Aaron called a cab, and when it arrived we all choked down another tequila shot.  Walking out, I glanced at a mountain of DVDs and video games by the TV, and some glossy, uneven posters of Scarface and 50 Cent taped to the living room wall.

——-

Only hours before, I’d driven under a cloudless October sky with the sun squared directly in front of my windshield, shedding its dull orange light across the scrappy desert floor as it fell behind a jagged copper mountain range.  A full moon took its place, and in its cool light I could see the outline of peaks protecting Salt Lake City, their black silhouette outlined against the stars.  I penetrated this all with my Hyundai, careening through those mountains and soaring into an open vista where Salt Lake City appeared below, splayed out in an electric poetry of organization, tiny lights in straight lines, amber and green.  The Great Salt Lake, which I’d heard was not so much a lake but more of a smelly, lifeless puddle that extended for miles, was like a big black blanket in the distance.    

——-

I say to Aaron, “Thank you so much for all this.”

“Don’t think of it, dude.  You’re doing us a service by being here.” 

Aaron’s been paying my cover all night at a series of bars, passing drink after drink in my direction.  His friends tell me that the beer is weaker in Utah, but as I near a dozen bottles after that string of tequila shots at the house, it doesn’t make much difference.  Every so often someone sends a colorful shot or a mystery cocktail my way.  I’m their communal guest, and the more I drink the further initiated and accepted I am into their circle.  

Two girls in tube tops join us and promptly lose their keys.  Aaron can’t find it in himself to abandon them.  I could.  It’s almost four in the morning and technically I have a concert coming up this afternoon.  Now we’re in the parking lot.  The girls are on their knees, searching below their car as Aaron and his friends negotiate and argue about the logistics of their rescue.   I watch this sloppy ballet from a curb, elbow leveraged against my thigh and my palm cradling my head.  Every so often my elbow slips and my torso flops forward like a rag doll.

Eventually we all — the girls included — pile into a cab back to Aaron’s condo, and from there he personally gives each of them a ride to their house.  The other guys find a place to sleep, and I return to the couch in front of the television, my senses wading in a cloudy pool of alcohol.  Aaron left his cell phone on the coffee table, and it’s still ringing.