Leaving Salt Lake City Read online

  Leaving

  Salt Lake City

  by Matthew Timion

  LEAVING

  SALT LAKE CITY

  copyright © 2013 by Matthew Timion

  Edited by Nicole Yabut

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  This book is a memoir, and it should be understood that the events detailed in this story are the author's recollection and perception. While names have been changed, the events in this book actually happened. The author has used every resource at his disposal to ensure the accuracy of the time line of the events.

  For further information please see the Author's Note at the end of the book.

  DEDICATION

  For my son Manny.

  Your ability to triumph over adversity inspires me daily.

  | ONE |

  June 28, 2007

  It was six in the morning. I snapped awake, anxious and shaking, unsure if my nightmare was real or not.

  It was real. The night before had really happened.

  My wife had called me on the phone last night and told me she knew I was cheating on her. She was away on a business trip in Oregon and had called me, accusing me of things that would end our marriage. She knew I did those things.

  I stood up and got out of bed. Our two dogs jumped out of bed and wanted to go outside. I would never see those dogs again.

  My wife, Jessica, was done with me. She apparently knew the horrible things I had done. I took the dogs outside and relived the night before over and over in my mind trying to find a way to fix the situation. I needed to do something - anything - to keep my life the way it had been for years. I couldn’t lose her. I couldn’t lose my wife.

  Oh my God. I was going to lose my wife. It was an impossible thought, and yet it seemed like a real possibility. Shit. I was going to lose my wife. I was going to lose my family.

  I walked into the house and was greeted by my son Manny, who Jessica and I adopted just a week before. A short four-year-old boy now had my last name. I had to catch my breath. I couldn’t breathe. I could lose him too.

  How did it all come to this? Jessica and I were so in love. We worked and built our life together; knowing we would always be at each others' side. It felt like the life we had built was going to be taken away in an instant.

  I remembered when I first met Jessica in early May of 2004. I was living in California while she was in Utah. We both belonged to an online community of former Mormons. We were hoping to find other people to connect with to validate the emotional turmoil we experienced after leaving our religion. One day I saw a new person to the group post a message online. Her picture was cute, and, filled with post-divorce lust and flirtatious admiration, I sent her a message.

  Quickly we started talking more and more. Within a few weeks she was on an airplane to visit me.

  I stood in the Ontario, California airport waiting for her to come down the escalator. We were sending each other text messages when I saw her at the top of the stairs. She was there looking around for me with her bleached blonde hair and busty bosom. Her tight pink t-shirt proclaimed “Jesus loves you and your tattoos," while she looked around herself. She called my cell phone. “Where are you?" I had stopped behind a pillar, awestruck, as I admired her from afar for a moment longer. I emerged from my reverie and walked up to her.

  “Hi,” she said, as she fell into my arms. She began kissing me right then and there. Her big soft lips felt amazing. I didn’t even notice the hundreds of people walking around the airport watching us lock lips. The woman I had met online was next to me, and I knew I was the luckiest man in the world. I knew nothing could spoil the weekend we had planned. I had finally met someone that made the pain and heartache I experienced in leaving Mormonism and divorcing my first wife worth it. I was ready for Jessica.

  The perfect woman I met at the airport eventually became my wife. I moved from Southern California to Utah to be with her. We eventually adopted a child together and became a family. The life I had always wanted was finally mine. We were happy.

  But that morning, the morning after she called me, we were not happy. The joy and bliss of our relationship was gone. It was replaced with fear and confusion. I can only imagine what it felt like for her.

  “I know what you did,” she had told me the night before. Her voice still echoed in my thoughts. “I’ve talked with fourteen friends, and all of them have told me things you’ve done!”

  I had to stay busy. I had to do something - anything - to get those thoughts off of my mind.

  I put cereal in a bowl for our son Manny. He sat in front of the television watching Spongebob unaware of the devastation surrounding me.

  The night before Jessica accused me of having sex with her nineteen year old cousin. “You child molester! I’m taking Manny and you’ll never see him again!” I looked at Manny eating his breakfast. I knew I might experience a life without him; I might never raise him into the man he should be.

  Everything I had worked for was crashing down on me because of a phone call.

  How could this have happened? What went wrong? I sipped my coffee with shaking hands knowing having a stimulant in my system wasn’t the best idea. What was I supposed to do though? How was I supposed to behave?

  “Dad, I want some ice cream!” Manny yelled. Manny called cantaloupe “ice cream,” so I stood up and prepared a few slices for him to eat while watching television. Thank God Manny was there to distract me, if even for a few minutes at a time. Uninterrupted obsession would have been the end of me.

  I sat back down in my chair not knowing what would happen next. I couldn’t fathom the “proof” Jessica had about my infidelity, but I knew nothing good could come from it.

  I had a fleeting thought about running. I could take Manny and leave; escape the craziness that had become my life over the last twelve hours. I decided instead to stay and hope Jessica could see reason. I loved her. I loved our family. The last thing I ever wanted was a life without her and our newly adopted son.

  I thought back to the first time she told me she loved me.

  I walked into our bedroom and saw her things all around. There were her clothes. Her shoes. A picture of her mother on the wall. I refused to live without her. She was my entire world.

  Waiting for her to return from her work trip, I worked on coming up with something, some story, to make the pain go away. I tried to figure out a way to stop the accusations and threats. I just wanted her to know I loved her. I wanted her to understand that Manny and I were her family.

  Until then I could only watch Spongebob with a four year old, pretending not to hurt, pretending not to be terrified of what the next few days might turn into.

  Then she barged into the house.

  PART 1

  | TWO |

  Christmas Day, 2004

  I was on the road; moving to my new home in Salt Lake City. My girlfriend Jessica was by my side. She had flown to California to make the trip with me. Catching a glimpse of her whenever I could, I knew there was something more to Jessica than her good looks.

  Reflecting back, I was too embarrassed to say what that something more was. She was the third woman named Jessica I had dated. I was an atheist, and I knew the nature of the universe was random, but a part of me felt a sense of destiny in dating Jessica. This relationship was a cosmic sign that I had finally met the right Jessica, and that perhaps my affection for previous Jessicas was a higher power’s way of directing me to the right path. In hindsight, I should have realized that Jessica was the most popular female baby name in America for child
ren born in the 1970s. If I had dated Catholic women, I am sure that I would have been just as surprised at the recurrence of the name Mary in my dating life - and found it just as significant - as I did the name Jessica.

  Driving the moving truck to Salt Lake City, we passed the time discussing our childhoods. Jessica was an absolutely fascinating woman. Her parents had met when her dad was a Mormon missionary in Chile. He returned to Chile after his two-year missionary service and married Jessica’s mother. They spent a number of years in Chile and eventually moved back to the United States when Jessica’s father’s job was transferred. Jessica told me about the difficulty of moving to America at the age of ten years old and having to learn English quickly.

  Jessica’s ability to learn English so quickly without a foreign accent amazed me. As a Mormon missionary, I spent two years living in the Philippines speaking nothing but Filipino, and my accent as a Filipino speaker is still very thick. I was awed by her native accent. She would tell stories often about how difficult it was for her to adjust to American life, diet, and culture. Her father’s parents never liked her siblings or her, and they would usually treat them differently than the other grandchildren in the family. Jessica attributed her grandfather’s disdain to the unchangeable reality that her mom was Chilean and had darker skin. Thus her mother, and by extension, Jessica and her siblings, were considered “lesser” by her white grandfather.

  There is a common racist undertone in the Mormon culture, which has roots in an old Mormon doctrine that the less faithful were once cursed with dark skin. According to this controversial teaching, all people with black skin are in fact descendants of Cain, he who killed Abel in the Bible. While these teachings have no real basis in official Mormon doctrine, they had been part of Mormon culture for almost one hundred and fifty years. When I heard her white grandfather disliked her family for having a different skin color, it made complete sense to me.

  My father and her mother both died at around the same time. We were almost the same age when we lost our parents. I had finally found a kindred spirit, one who knew what it was like to lose someone so young. She made my heartache feel justified. I didn’t have to explain to her the pain of leaving Mormonism, my subsequent divorce, or the death of a parent. She simply understood.

  Jessica’s ability to empathize made her everyone’s instant friend. Her personality made her the center of everything. She was the most popular person in our group of friends; the one who threw the best parties that everyone insisted on attending. I was beyond thrilled, being nothing more than a computer geek, that the popular girl wanted me as much as I wanted her. I wanted to take a picture of us together and send it to every ex-girlfriend I had ever had. A picture wouldn’t had done justice to how she made you feel around her, however. That was something you had to experience for yourself.

  As we drove, the temperature outside changed from warm, to brisk, to cold. We arrived in Salt Lake City and pulled up to the house I had purchased sight unseen. Jessica had found the house for us; I had bought it with my money, knowing we would live there together. It was on the west side of town, which was often considered a bad neighborhood. This reputation was probably because of the high percentage of immigrants in the area, but we were okay with that. In fact, we prefered it. We were better than the suburban white-bread families who were afraid of Hispanics and Polynesians. The misunderstood were our people. We fit in better with them than in a neighborhood with white picket fences.

  While preparing for my arrival, Jessica had been living in our new house with her two dogs and a cat for a month. She had spent the time painting, pulling out carpet, and redoing the ceilings. At around one o’clock in the afternoon the trip to our new home was over. We pulled into the driveway. The ground was frozen solid, but there was no snow. It was quite the change from Southern California, but it was a change I was happy about, one I had signed up for.

  Looking around my new city I was amazed at how many giant SUVs I saw. Having just moved from Southern California, I was used to people living beyond their means, but the motivation for these lavish displays was different. While not a doctrine preached from the pulpit, I had always noticed how many faithful Mormons attributed financial success to spiritual righteousness. God blessed the faithful with material things and punished the unfaithful with poverty. Luckily one did not need to be faithful to appear pious. One only needed a credit card. Even if one lacked religious devotion, the giant SUV cemented his or her reputation as the most righteous person on the block.

  The next morning I awoke early, eager to begin unpacking the moving truck and then returning it to its owners. Jessica handed me a cup of coffee. As I began to consume the only thing that could make me think straight, a steady stream of people began knocking on our door. It was the morning after Christmas, and, before I could put on my pants, my new bungalow was filled with no less than twenty people. Was it Mormons coming to welcome me to the neighborhood? Were they going to offer to help on condition that I attended church the following week? No, the small assembly in my house were all former Mormons eager to help.

  As Mormons we had oftentimes been guilted into doing this exact same duty by being reminded that service is next to Godliness. I had hated when new people moved into my congregation. I had hated volunteering to unload a moving truck, but I had done it anyway. These people, walking around my house seemingly unaware of my blue pajamas, were all there of their own free will to help an unspiritual brother unload furniture. Their presence reminded me again of our shared identity and that the community I had lost when leaving Mormonism had been replaced by a community of people just like me.

  Jessica vanished into the basement and came back up holding a box. “Where should I put these?” she asked.

  “What are those?" I was uncertain of the contents of the box. She was clutching the box like it might explode if she dropped it.

  “This is my collection of shot glasses I stole from bars.”

  Jessica had a knack for stealing from restaurants and bars. It was normal for her to steal shot glasses, silverware, or even pictures off of the walls. They were mementos from places she had been on wonderful evenings. She hung the Absinthe picture she had lifted from a club in our dining room. Seeing the new artwork in our dining room, I thought of how happy I was she hadn’t brought the giant “Road Closed” sign that had served as a headboard from her apartment. Thankfully the orange construction cones were nowhere to be found either.

  Her innocent kleptomania was not abnormal. What was abnormal was that you would steal things too when you were with her. There was something about Jessica that made you do things you would never normally consider. Stealing, verbally abusing someone, excessive drinking, or making out with a member of the same gender in front of twenty other people. (“Spin the Bottle” was a common party game for this group of former Mormons.) You would do these things around Jessica, and you would keep doing them as long as you received her approval.

  ***

  To understand the dynamics of my new kindred spirits, one must understand a little bit more about Mormonism. Mormonism is a religion of leadership. Everyone has a leader, all the way up to the President of the Church (revered by the membership as being a living prophet). Even the President of the Church has a leader: Jesus Christ himself. Within individual congregations there are multiple levels of leadership that report to a larger geographical leadership who also report to an even higher geographical leadership. Ascending the hierarchy, each leader has progressively more authority and is perceived to be more divinely inspired, adding more and more weight to his words.

  Taking orders from your leaders is ingrained into Mormon theology, and, as a result, is a cornerstone of the cultural identity of Mormonism. It should be no surprise then that ex-Mormons, despite rejecting the religion and all it stands for, seek out similar forms of leadership, even if the overt hierarchy is not there. Having spent years as Mormons, listening to a church hierarchy, it was only natural to want structure.

 
***

  The leadership in the ex-Mormon community was not appointed by God, like the Mormon leadership, nor was the leadership formally declared. One man, Lester, seemed to be the voice of the group due largely to his lifetime of unique experiences. Lester was openly gay, an artist, heavily tattooed, an eccentric, and had met celebrities. His life reflected what most of us wanted our lives to be. He handed out wisdom instead of insults. Lester always expressed an understanding of hatred, having experienced so much of it himself. While most sought him for guidance and counsel, others still preferred to make their own life decisions without Lester’s approval.

  Two camps began forming slowly in our community. Those who seemed to be stuck on Mormonism (culturally or theologically) gravitated towards Lester. The other camp, those who had moved on from Mormonism years prior, considered Lester and his followers to be rather silly. It was not until years later that I understood that both groups were one and the same.

  Jessica, in her own right, was also a leader in the community. She was not a wise sage, as many viewed Lester, but the embodiment of fun and partying. People looked up to her with awe and excitement, partially because of the interesting life she led, but mostly because she made you feel younger, sexy, and fun when you were around her. She had a way of bringing out the party animal in all of us, something we were mostly too reserved to do for ourselves.

  I always interpreted Jessica’s command of a group as a result of her being a natural leader. This was likely a major factor in why so many people came to help us move in. Many people came that day, and they didn’t leave right away either. After a few hours of unpacking, unloading and getting settled, the house was mostly all set up. Some friends stayed, and some friends left. Those who stayed consumed beer, which always appeared to be the holy communion of former Mormons.